A Multi-Wireless Bandwidth Aggregation Mechanism in SDN Networks

Nowadays, the popularity of smart mobile devices drives the mobile data traffic into a faster growth. For handling the extreme growth of mobile data traffic, the mobile telecommunication operator tries to upgrade the core network equipment to expand the data capacity of services, but compare with the exponentially growing mobile data traffic, the effect is limited. In addition, most of the current multi-RAT integration researches need protocols supported by both the clients and servers, or have the transmission efficiency bottleneck problem caused by the packet reordering. Therefore, this paper proposes the SDN-based multi-RAT bandwidth aggregation mechanism for handling the transmission path selection and switching among LTE, Wi-Fi, and other multi-RAT. The proposed multi-RAT online access software, aggregation control application, and data flow analysis application are installed in the UE terminal and SDN network terminal respectively for handling the multi-RAT bandwidth aggregation. The UE only needs to install the multi-RAT online access software through the proposed mechanism, while the application services executed in the UE terminal do not need to be modified under the proposed approach. When a single network could not satisfy the QoS requirements of UE (e.g., the UE executes several application services which require different QoS classes simultaneously), the proposed SDN-based multiRAT bandwidth aggregation mechanism can transmit the routing device, satisfy the network QoS requirements of the UE terminal and improve the utilized efficiency of whole network according to the current network transmission efficiency and the characteristics of the service flows transmitted by the UE.