Delay Jitter Performance Analysis and Traffic Splitting in Cellular-Based Multi-Access System

This paper addresses the problem of traffic splitting in the multi-access system for real-time applications in the uplink. We first understand the Long Term Evolution (LTE)-uplink-scheduling mechanism using Network Simulator (NS-3) and then analyse the LTE-Packet Data Convergence Protocol queue length process at the end of User Equipment (UE). We provide an end-to-end delay jitter analysis on a single LTE network for the Constant Bit Rate (CBR) Traffic. We observe that the delay jitter only depends on the allocation (Transport Block Size) provided by eNodeB but not on the allocation rate. The main finding is the structural dependency of the delay jitter on one of the CBR parameters: inter-burst time. We then utilize this to develop an online-adaptive traffic splitting algorithm in the multi-access system to improve the overall delay jitter performance of the system. We formulate the traffic splitting problem as an optimization problem applicable to different objective functions. We validate and share our real-world experimental results for the video/Real-time Transport Protocol traffic.