Traffic-aware Carrier-Grade WiFi SON

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The increasing demand for improving the quality of residential wireless services in recent years, driven by thearrival of the Internet of Things (IoT) and real-time applications, has resulted in new edge-based provisioningmodels. WiFi is at the central of this movement as it is dominating indoor wireless connectivity. However,WiFi has been designed as a best-effort and fair-share service, which is no longer appropriate for QoS (Qualityof Service) -driven edge computing services. XCellAir Inc. is developing WiFi SON (Self-OrganizingNetwork), an award-wining product, to provide carrier-grade WiFi service for a variety of applications, fromresidential usage to smart city. Unfortunately, lacking QoE (Quality of Experience) measurements and usagepattern characterization might result in sub-optimal decisions and under-utilization of network resources, asobserved in the testbed implemented at the residential campus of the Ecole de technologie superieure (ETS).This project is therefore aimed to add traffic analytics and prediction to XCellAir's WiFi SON platform, at bothdata and control planes, to capture traffic, monitor resource utilization, construct usage patterns, and forecastevolution trends of several system metrics. Leveraging on cloud computing technology, the platform willimprove the performance and reliability of carrier-grade WiFi networks, in view of achieving the efficiency ofedge-based services, minimizing resource consumption, and guaranteeing QoE/QoS. The outcome of thisproject will contribute substantially to the successful achievement of the product, as well as to Canadiantelecommunication industry as the product is being exploited by major carriers in this country. This technologywill enable the creation of a new class of smart city services which are deployed at the last-mile close to endusers, thus providing unprecedented QoS. The project will also significantly contribute to the establishment ofthe first smart city project in Quebec - the Montreal Innovation District, and to the development of a digital andsustainable economy of Quebec and Canada.