Performance Gains of a Hybrid Wi-Fi/LTE Architecture

Wi-Fi is providing hotspot capacity in conjunction with broadband cellular networks. We propose to divert uplink 802.11 MAC layer traffic to the cellular uplink towards improving range and downlink efficiency. This architecture uses the large unlicensed spectrum on the downlink, and the higher power and other advanced media access and physical layer techniques of LTE uplink. Initial measurements show an improvement in Wi-Fi efficiency of about 30 percent due to the otherwise large airtime spent on TCP acknowledgements. Based on propagation and 802.11n receiver models, indoor area coverage at high bit rate (100 Mbps) is improved by a factor of 20. Maximum range is improved by a factor of 4 for indoor-to-outdoor scenarios. These are examples of gains beyond the federation of bandwidth usually associated with integration.