de Coordination strategies between multiple RAT - MultiRat-Coord - Vodafone Chair Mobile Communications - National Instruments Dresden GmbH

Coordination strategies between multiple RAT - MultiRat-Coord


As of today, it cannot be foreseen that there will be only a single RAT in the future that can be used for all spectrum bands addressing the diverse set of anticipated service requirements. Therefore, the use of RAT interworking techniques and coordination strategies is required. One specific challenge is to enable interworking of parallel RATs to exploit the benefits of those individual options and deliver the required services to the user. Thus, in ORCA an NS-3 based prototyping platform for RAT interworking technics will be established.


Real experimentation results are often missing because e.g. either LTE or 802.11 prototyping systems are available only, but not both. The same holds for LTE and 5G-NR (5G New Radio). However, to proof that the anticipated performance gains translate into reality joint experimentations and measurements are necessary. Therefore, in ORCA a new prototyping setup will be created using NI’s SDR platform in combination with the NS-3 network simulator. With that system various deployment and test scenarios are possible that allow for experiments that have not been possible so far.

  • Allowing end-to-end experiments to investigate for e.g. in aggregation and split of user data.
  • Platform is extendable for interworking concepts such as MPTCP, LWIP, LWA, Dual Connectivity, Carrier Aggregation (see also available Extension MultiRat-LWx).
  • Enable interworking of different types of communication systems: scheduled vs. ad-hoc.
  • Flexible programming and configuration using real-time capable SDR components such as FPGA and Linux RT CPU.
  • Fast simulation and integration process using NS-3 loopback modes.

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