Multi-RAT Traffic Steering

kin5000

Summary
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.