A multi-RAT bandwidth aggregation mechanism with software-defined networking

The population of smart mobile devices drives the mobile traffic growth rapidly. To deal with the traffic explosion, heterogeneous radio network integration is considered as a cost-effective solution for mobile operators to reduce network congestion. With the coverage overlapping of various wireless networks (e.g., LTE and Wi-Fi), we can use multiple networks to transfer different services simultaneously. In this paper, we integrate the multiple radio access technology (multi-RAT) with software-defined networking (SDN) to make the multi-RAT network more programmable, dynamically manageable and adaptable. The analytic model and performance evaluation show that our mechanism can significantly reduce the response times when the multi-RAT network traffic is unbalanced, where the throughput degradation of adapting our mechanism is 4.15% on average.