LTE-WLAN Aggregation Flow Control

LTE-WLAN Aggregation (LWA) has recently emerged as a promising 3GPP Release 13 technology to efficiently integrate LTE and WLAN at the PDCP layer, allowing uplink traffic to be carried on LTE and downlink on both LTE and WLAN. This removes all the contention asymmetry problems of WLAN and allows an optimum usage of both licensed and unlicensed band for downlink. In this paper, we present a new feature of LWA, its flow control scheme, which controls how to aggregate downlink traffic in licensed and unlicensed bands. This aggregation technique exploits UE-based flow control feedback in the form of LWA status reports, and can be expanded to work with any number of frequency bands and radio technologies. Simulation results in a typical enterprise scenario show that LWA can enhance user performance up to 8.0x over LTE-only, and 3.7x over WLAN only networks, respectively. The impact of the file size and LWA status report