Boosted Wifi Through Lte Small Cells: The Solution For An All-Wireless Enterprise

Wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) benefits from large downlink bandwidth but suffers from inefficient uplink contention, while long term evolution (LTE) benefits from efficient scheduling in the uplink but suffers from bandwidth scarcity in the downlink. In this paper, we quantify the performance gain of Boost, a new technology that blends the advantages of Wi-Fi and LTE in an efficient manner to overcome their individual disadvantages. By redirecting uplink traffic from Wi-Fi to LTE, Boost avoids resource waste due toWi-Fi contention in the uplink. Since the radio channel is now fully under the control of an scheduler, downlink controlled by Wi-Fi AP scheduler and uplink controlled by LTE scheduler, delays and rates can be guaranteed. Simulation results show that in typical enterprise scenarios, Boost significantly decreases packet delay up to 85% and increases user throughput up to 3.5x, which is beneficial for delay-sensitive and best effort applications, respectively. This positions Boost as a strong candidate for realising the all-wireless enterprise.