The proliferation and penetration of smart phones and IoT devices is having profound impact on world economy. In order to support billions of wirelessly connected devices, and tackle exponentially increasing traffic demands and ever-increasing Quality of Experience and energy efficiency requirements of diverse services and applications being carried over communication network infrastructure, convergence and coexistence of various radio access technologies (RATs) is required. In this work, we present various architectures and traffic steering mechanisms for efficient interworking of LTE and Wi-Fi networks and evaluate their performance for carrying TCP traffic which is sensitive to out-of-order delivery of packets at the receiver. Unlike interworking which requires simultaneous usage of both LTE and Wi-Fi radios at user equipment (UE), mobile operators are considering deployment of LTE-U/LAA in unlicensed bands so that only one radio is used at UE. However, to use unlicensed bands LTE-U/LAA needs to fairly co-exist with Wi-Fi. To address this inter-RAT hidden terminal problem, we present novel solutions that either rely on a central inter-RAT controller or work without any such controller in a distributed manner.

中文翻译：

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LTE与Wi-Fi网络的融合与共存

智能手机和物联网设备的扩散和渗透对世界经济产生深远影响。为了支持数十亿个无线连接的设备，并解决通信网络基础设施上承载的各种服务和应用的流量需求和体验质量以及能效要求不断增长的趋势，各种无线接入技术（RAT）的融合和共存是必须的。在这项工作中，我们提出了用于LTE和Wi-Fi网络高效互通的各种体系结构和流量控制机制，并评估了它们在承载TCP流量时的性能，该性能对接收方数据包的无序发送很敏感。与需要在用户设备（UE）同时使用LTE和Wi-Fi无线电的互通不同，移动运营商正在考虑在非授权频段中部署LTE-U / LAA，以便在UE处仅使用一个无线电。但是，要使用非许可频段，LTE-U / LAA必须与Wi-Fi并存。为了解决此RAT间隐藏终端问题，我们提出了新颖的解决方案，这些解决方案要么依靠中央RAT间控制器，要么以分布式方式不使用任何此类控制器而工作。