Design and Experimental Validation of Radio Access Network Controller Prototype for Multi-RAT Technologies with Scheduler Strategies

The main aspects of this paper are to show the involvement towards coordination strategies amongst multiple RATs and integration of parametric control of higher MAC and upper layer network protocols. Moreover, we also evaluate and examine the possibility to take advantage of the fact of using interworking concepts such as lightweight Internet protocol (LWIP) and LTE-WLAN aggregation (LWA) while making the scheduling decisions. Such a solution would contribute to the software-defined networking (SDN) approach, where multi-RAT aware scheduler adapts to dynamic channel conditions to provide robustness against severe real-time channel conditions. Finally, we provide comparative analysis of multi- RAT scenarios and evaluate the QoE performance of different scheduling algorithms with SINR based information centric LWA switching and QoE-aware LWA switching by using RANC.