'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
Nowadays a cellular network suffers from a data traffic load in a metropolitan area due to the enormous number of mobile devices connectivity. Therefore, the users experience many issues because of a congestion and overload at an access network such as low throughput, long latencies and network outages. Current network operator’s solutions, such as capping data usage and throttling a connection speed, have a negative effect on the user satisfaction. Therefore, alternative solutions are needed such as Access Point (AP)-based complementary network. In this paper, we use WiFi as a complementary network to Long-Term Evolution (LTE). We propose a seamless network architecture between LTE and WiFi networks, by utilizing the packet gateway (P-GW) as an IP flow anchor between LTE and WiFi to maintain a seamless connectivity. The proposed architecture has two new components, Access Network Query Protocol-Data Server (ANQP-DS) and Access Zone Control (AZC), to WiFi core network for managing UE authentication and balancing the load of UEs between APs. Finally, we demonstrate and validate the effectiveness of our proposed idea over other prior approaches based on comparison with a current handover and Extensible Authentication Protocol-Authentication and Key Agreement (EAP-AKA) mechanisms in the literature through simulations
