An SDN-based seamless convergence approach of WLAN and LTE networks

Due to the growing demands of various mobile services and large data traffic in wireless networks, WLAN has been deemed as an important complementary technology for offloading LTE network data. However, currently, WLAN and LTE networks are usually deployed independently, many important coordination and joint optimization can't be achieved, which may lead to low efficiency resource usage and bad user experience. To make a seamless convergence of these two networks still faces many challenges, among which seamless mobility is put forward as one of the most important issues. In this paper, an SDN-based convergence approach is proposed. SDN is introduced from both the access network and core network. Firstly, a virtualization based seamless handover in WLAN is introduced. Then a convergence architecture is proposed, and a handover workflow is designed to support the seamless mobility. Finally, we set up a test bed of the proposed architecture, including WLAN and LTE networks. Our experiment results demonstrate that service disruption delay is less than 100ms during handover, which means seamless convergence can be achieved in the proposed architecture.