Boosted WiFi through LTE Small Cells: The Solution for an All-Wireless Enterprise

WiFi benefits from large downlink bandwidth but suffers from inefficient uplink contention, while LTE benefits from efficient scheduling in the uplink but suffers from bandwidth scarcity in the downlink. In this paper, we put forward Boost, a new technology that blends the advantages of WiFi and LTE in an efficient manner to overcome their main disadvantages. By redirecting UL traffic from the wireless fidelity (WiFi) network interface to the long term evolution (LTE) network interface WiFi contention is avoided, which leads to an all scheduled network that can jointly leverage licensed and unlicensed bandwidth. Since the channel use is now fully under the control of the scheduler, delays and rates can be guaranteed, which is extremely helpful in providing real-time services as well as best effort performance. This paper shows that Voice over Boost is much more efficient than Voice over WiFi. In particular, simulation results show that in typical enterprise scenarios, Boost! (Boost!) can enhance Voice over IP delay by more than an order of magnitude, enhancing its capacity, while significantly improving file transfer protocol (FTP) throughput too. This positioning Boost as a strong candidate for providing wireless services in the future enterprises.