Load Balancing in LTE Mobile Networks with Information Centric Networking

Authors

Abstract

Mobile networks usage rapidly increased over the years, with a boom in terms of connected devices and used bandwidth to sustain access to heavy traffic content. Although technologies such as 3GPP Long Term Evolution brought major improvements and hence higher data rates, performance and resources utilization efficiency are still a challenge. At the same time, strategies such as Wi-Fi offloading cannot cope with those performance and efficiency requirements, bringing only a small improvement. In this extended abstract, mechanisms to use Information Centric Networking as an enabler and value-added technology to perform load balancing in mobile networks are presented. Taking advantage of the network agnostic implementation of Information Centric Networking, it is then possible to provide content delivery over multiple radio technologies with different radio stacks at the same time, and thus efficiently using resources and improving the overall performance of content transfer. With such novel approach, meaningful results were obtained by comparing content transfer over single links with typical strategies to content transfer over multiple links with Information Centric Networking load balancing. Information Centric Networking load balancing between radio technologies increases the performance and efficiency of 3GPP Long Term Evolution mobile networks and improves the Quality of Experience for end users.

Keywords

Information centric networking, load balancing, LTE

Subject

2014 Doctoral Workshop on Distributed Systems

TechReport Number

IAM-14-001

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