Multi - RAT Traffic Steering – Why , when , and how could it be beneficial ?

Simultaneous deployment of multiple Radio Access Technologies (RATs) and multiple bands of the same RATs in a given coverage area, call for an efficient utilization of the overall available resources to carry the complete offered user traffic, and to provide a superior user experience. Traffic steering aims at distributing the offered load in an optimal manner across different RATs and bands in order to fulfil the desires of both the network operators and the end-users. This concise white paper presents the fundamental concepts involved in the design of generic traffic steering algorithms, and provides a brief description of some primitive traffic steering algorithms explaining the intuition behind them. Finally, we present the current status of our system level multi-RAT / multi-band simulation capabilities, and provide an overview of how more sophisticated traffic steering algorithm can be designed, and how could their performance be compared in terms of different performance metrics.