NextGen-MHS: A Novel Architecture for Tethering of Aggregated Licensed and Unlicensed Spectrums
Vijay Kumar Mishra, Venkata Sunil Kumar B, Bhagwan Dass Swami, Madhan Raj Kanagarathinam, Pankaj Bhimrao Thorat, Debabrata Das · 2019
Mobile Hotspots are very popular as they use 4G-LTE (via eNodeB to the network) to provide connectivity to multiple User Equipments (UEs). Additionally, In order to improve the performance of a session from a UE which is directly connected to the eNodeB, literature has proposed Multi-Pathing (MP) concepts (Multi Path TCP, Multi Path QUIC). However, these MP concepts do not work for a UE connected to eNodeB through the hotspot. Moreover, to improve the performance of hotspot, there can be MP connections from mobile hotspot itself. First one from hotspot to LTE eNodeB (Licensed spectrum) and second to WiFi (unlicensed) Access Point (AP). To the best of our knowledge, in available literature, a hotspot device does not provide MP aggregation of licensed and unlicensed spectrums to the connected UEs. Secondly, traffic from the hotspot device majorly goes over LTE hence congesting the licensed spectrum. With respect to the above two challenges, we proposed a novel hotspot architecture called Next-Gen Mobile HotSpot (NextGen-MHS), which is a unique approach to aggregate any combination of available licensed (4G/5G) with unlicensed (WiFi/5G) spectrum and provide the aggregated connection as a Mobile-Hotspot AP. We have successfully implemented this new architecture of NextGen-MHS and conducted evaluation experiments with 4G (licensed) and WiFi (unlicensed). NextGen-MHS significantly provides better results with 80% aggregated throughput and 45% reduction in data traffic over licensed spectrum.