Software-Based Implementation of Dual Connectivity for LTE

Pupiales, Carlos; Nitzold, Walter; Felber, Clemens; Demirkol, Ilker

doi:10.1109/massw.2019.00048

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…This, in turn, may result in outof-order packet reception, which would degrade the performance of reliability-oriented transport layer protocols such as the Transport Control Protocol (TCP). Indeed, because of out-of-order issues, the aggregate throughput can even be lower than the one achieved in SC, as we showed in [6]. To minimize this problem, the receiving PDCP layer should reorder the packets before delivering them to the upper layers.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Capacity and Congestion Aware Flow Control Mechanism for Efficient Traffic Aggregation in Multi-Radio Dual Connectivity

2021

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Multi-Radio Dual Connectivity (MR-DC) is a key 3GPP technology that enables traffic aggregation leveraging the radio resources of two base stations (BSs) and thereby increasing the per-user data rate. However, the traffic aggregation management in MR-DC is left up to vendor implementation. In this paper, we show that enabling an efficient traffic aggregation method is of crucial importance to increase the throughput performance of both TCP-and UDP-based applications in MR-DC operation. Targeting the gap on the state of the art on this topic, we propose a flow control mechanism, which efficiently aggregates traffic based on the assigned radio resources and buffering delay statistics of both BSs. The proposed traffic aggregation mechanism is applicable irrespective of the employed MR-DC architecture option, MAC packet scheduler design, and transport layer protocol in use. By means of exhaustive testbed experiments, we show that the proposed method achieves at least the 85% and 95% of the theoretical aggregate throughput when employing MR-DC for TCP and UDP traffic, respectively.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 94%

Capacity and Congestion Aware Flow Control Mechanism for Efficient Traffic Aggregation in Multi-Radio Dual Connectivity

2021

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“…The testbed is based on the split DRB architecture and implements the user plane functionalities of DC detailed in [9]. Further details of the testbed implementation can be found as part of our previous works in [3] and [45]. The testbed setup and the evaluation scenarios are given in the following.…”

Section: Evaluation Frameworkmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fast Data Recovery for Improved Mobility Support in Multiradio Dual Connectivity

2022

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Data aggregation is one of the crucial features of the 3GPP Multi-Radio Dual Connectivity (MR-DC) technology. However, mobility events and radio link failures, which may occur during the data aggregation, may pose challenges in meeting the latency, reliability, and throughput key performance indicators (KPIs). Unlike single connectivity, the user equipment (UE) in MR-DC operation can experience such events in either of the two base stations (BSs) serving the UE with MR-DC. In typical MR-DC deployments, these events occur more frequently in the BS acting as the secondary node (SN) since the SN operates at a higher frequency band. In this paper, we show that handovers (HOs) and signal blockage events that occur at the SN can create out-of-order data reception or losses at the UE's Packet Data Control Protocol (PDCP) layer, making the application stop receiving data for up to hundreds of milliseconds. Thus, challenging to meet the KPIs defined for such application. To mitigate this effect, we propose an intelligent and efficient mechanism that operates in the transmitting PDCP layer and significantly minimizes the data interruption periods suffered by the application when the UE aggregates data and HOs or failures of the SN occur. We use LTE/NR testbed experiments to show that the proposed mechanism achieves a high and stable aggregate throughput with near-zero interruption time and data reliability of at least five nines without transport layer retransmissions. The experiments are conducted for saturated TCP traffic and under link quality variations based on traces extracted from a Nokia-proprietary system-level simulator.

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