Improving the Customer Experience for Heterogeneous Wireless Access

The landscape for wireless connectivity is changing rapidly, and with these changes come new challenges for delivering a high quality customer experience. Over the last few years there has been a massive growth in the volume of mobile data consumed by both laptops and smartphones.

The latter, in particular, have seen a huge expansion in numbers with smartphones forecast to rise to 64 percent of all mobile phone sales in Western Europe by 2015. In parallel, public Wi-Fi networks have grown beyond expectations-in the UK, for example, BT (British Telecommunications plc) now has over 1.5 million public hotspots. This leaves the challenge of how best to exploit both cellular and Wi-Fi coverage while delivering a simple customer experience to the end users. 

In this paper, we describe a prototype connection management solution that makes use of network based session mobility, congestion detection, user movement modeling, and network-based handover control. We then present results of a small scale trial of the system and identify remaining issues. This work is the product of a collaborative research project between BT and Alcatel-Lucent.