Hybrid Access Networks

Several governments, notably in Europe, required network operators to provide fast Internet services to all inhabitants with a minimum of 30 Mbps by 2020.

To illustrate them, we assume that the end user has an hybrid CPE (Customer-premises_equipment) router that is attached to both a wired access network such as xDSL and a wireless one such as LTE.

A first deployment scenario is to allocate different IP addresses to the wired and wireless interfaces.

In this case, the hybrid CPE router needs to load-balance intelligently the packets over the two networks.

One technical difficulty that occurs when distributing packets over such heterogeneous links is to accurately detect congestion, notably on the wireless network whose bandwidth can vary quickly, and cope with the reordering which is caused by the delay difference.

This approach leverages the ability of MPTCP to efficiently handle congestion and cope with reordering on the heterogeneous access links.