LWA Rate Adaption by Enhanced Event-Triggered Reporting

Abstract

Unlicensed spectrum has been utilized to open up additional capacity to support long-term evolution (LTE) service. LTE and wireless local area network (WLAN) Aggregation (LWA) is a perfect solution that satisfies this need. In 2017, Taiwan has deployed the first commercial LWA service. The deployed LWA network reuses and is nicely merged with the existing individual LTE and WLAN networks. To provide appropriate WLAN transmission bandwidth, the user equipment periodically measures the WLAN quality and reports the results to the eNB (the LTE base station). The eNB then decides if the transmission rate should be adapted. We investigate the performance of periodical reporting and then propose the enhanced event-triggered reporting to improve the performance of WLAN transmission rate adaption. We suggest how to select appropriate frequency to minimize the network traffic of periodical reporting. We also show that enhanced event-triggered reporting outperforms periodical reporting. Our solution utilizes the standard 3GPP protocols and does not modify the mobile phone's software.