Testbed to experiment with LTE WiFi Aggregation

Due to the exponential growth in data usage that mobile networks have been experiencing in the past years, improvements in the performance and capacity of these networks have become key for the next mobile generation. Traffic aggregation at different layers in the radio interface increases the bandwidth and reliability for specific users. A promising aggregation approach for future networks is LWIP, which consists of LTE-WLAN aggregation at the IP level, just above the PDCP layer. It allows integrating WiFi with the LTE access network for the user plane data, making use of the legacy WLAN infrastructure. This paper presents a testbed where researchers can test different aggregation policies with real LTE and WiFi traffic making use of our own LWIP implementation.