Towards Delay-Optimal Multi-Connectivity Traffic Management for Edge Networks

With multiple radio access technologies such as Wi-Fi, LTE, SG available at the edge, increasingly prevalent multi-radio end devices can establish multiple concurrent connections with the edge server to deliver data traffic with more bandwidth, lower latency and higher reliability. To fully harvest multi-connectivity benefits, the edge network requires intelligent traffic management to efficiently utilize radio resources as well as to optimize quality-of-service (QoS) metrics. This paper presents a general framework for multi-connectivity traffic management at the edge, and provides algorithms for routing traffic over multiple paths to enhance the latency QoS metric. Simulation results demonstrate that, with two concurrent radio connections such as LTE and WiFi, our proposed edge traffic management algorithm can achieve significant latency reduction by more than 4x for the 95-th packet latency, and 23x in delay violation rate reduction given 10 ms latency target when compared to slate-of-the-art client-based traffic management solutions.