ATOM: Practical Traffic Management for Next-generation LTE-WiFi Networks

Mobile operators are leveraging WiFi access to relieve pressure on their cellular networks and offer faster
data rates to meet the surging demand of applications. However in today’s networks, operators either lack or have naive mechanisms to control the way end users access their WiFi networks. As operators deploy LTE networks that offer significantly higher data rates, intelligent traffic offloading to WiFi networks can enable operators to meet the rising traffic demand in a cost effective manner. In this regard, we design and implement ATOM -- an end-end solution for adaptive traffic offloading solution for heterogenous WiFi and LTE deployments. ATOM consists of two novel components: (i) A practical network interface selection algorithm that maps user traffic across WiFi and LTE to optimize user QoE and (ii) an interface switching service that provides seamless re-direction of ongoing user sessions to enable dynamic traffic management in a cost-effective and standards-compatible manner.
ACM Mobicom 2014 Paper








The following demo shows the efficacy of ATOM on a heterogeneous LTE and WiFI testbed.

 

In this demo, we setup an LTE basestation and a WiFi AP with 6 users such that 5 users are within the converage of the WiFi AP. All 6 users stream a 480P video from Youtube. We show the video streams of the 5 WiFi users in the demo video above.

In the demo video, the first part depicts the WiFi-default scenario which represents the current network deployment where user flows are always mapped to WiFi AP if available. Since, all 5 users access their video streams through WiFi, the WiFi AP gets congested resulting in frequent stalls (re-buffering) in the video for all the 5 WiFi users. While the resource utilization of the LTE basestation is low. In the second part, we turn on ATOM which choses the flows of users 1 and 4 to be switched to the LTE network resulting in good QoE and a smooth video stream for all 5 users.