An Optimized and Distributed Data Packet Forwarding Scheme in LTE/LTE-A Networks

Long-term evolution (LTE)/LTE-advanced (LTE-A) networks have recently introduced a data packet forwarding scheme between evolved node Bs (eNBs) to reduce the signaling overhead and the delay incurred in the data path switching scheme, which is a baseline handover scheme in LTE/LTE-A networks. Even with the data packet forwarding scheme, if the length of the forwarding chain is set inappropriately, the data packet forwarding scheme suffers from the degraded throughput. To attain the optimal handover performance in terms of throughput and delay and reduce the signaling overhead, we propose an optimized and distributed data packet forwarding scheme where the optimal length of the forwarding chain is obtained by a Markov decision process (MDP). In addition, a low-complexity value iteration algorithm is devised to solve the optimality equation of MDP in a more practical manner. Real trace-driven evaluation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme determines the optimal length of the forwarding chain adaptively to the applications' quality-of-service (QoS) requirements and reduces the signaling overhead and delay while achieving higher throughput in diverse environments.