Patent Application
20060182152
This invention generally relates to telecommunications. More particularly, this invention relates to wireless communication systems.
Wireless communication systems are well known and in widespread use. The most common use of such systems is for voice communications using cell phones. More recently, uses of such systems for data communications, video communications and combinations of voice, data and video have grown in popularity. As wireless service providers increase their capabilities, there are increasing demands for such services.
One challenge facing wireless service providers is continuously upgrading the capacity and capability of their systems. Those skilled in the art are always striving to find ways to provide enhanced services or new services. Various improvements have been made in this area. For example, different signaling techniques and channel configurations have been proposed for increasing bandwidth and throughput.
Every wireless technology has a limit on the achievable throughput based on the design of the system. Once a wireless communication system is deployed, there is effectively a hard cap on the achievable user throughput performance. For example, some EVDO systems typically support up to a 153.6 Kbps channel rate along the reverse link (i.e., from a mobile station to a base station). For situations where a higher throughput performance is desired, the wireless communication system must be upgraded or replaced with an advanced technology capable of supporting the higher throughput. Such upgrade or replacement processes are expensive and, in many cases, not feasible.
One instance where higher throughput capacity is required is to support wireless data access technologies. Certain data applications or programs, for example, are not useful with existing wireless communication systems because the throughput available with those systems is not adequate to support data communications using such an application.
There is a need for increasing the throughput capacity of wireless communication systems in an economical manner without requiring a complete replacement or redesign of an existing system. This invention addresses that need.
An exemplary disclosed method of communicating between a wireless network and a mobile station having a plurality of wireless access terminals includes using a physical traffic channel for each of the terminals and transmitting a first portion of a communication using one of the physical traffic channels and a second portion of the communication using another one of the physical traffic channels. Using more than one traffic channel for a single communication between the wireless network and the mobile station increases the available throughput, which enables wireless communications for a wider variety of data applications.
One example includes providing an indication with the transmission of each of the first and second portions of the communication that indicates a relationship between the portions. A receiver of the communication over the plurality of physical traffic channels interprets the indication and combines the portions of the communication from each channel for handling the communication as it was intended to be.
In one example, each of the physical traffic channels has a throughput and the method includes achieving an aggregate transmission throughput for the communication over the combined channels that corresponds to a sum of the two channel throughputs. In many examples, the aggregate transmission throughput is less than a numerical sum of the throughputs of the individual traffic channels.
The various features and advantages of this invention will become apparent to those skilled in the art from the following detailed description. The drawings that accompany the detailed description can be briefly described as follows.
In the illustrated example, the mobile station 22 can communicate with the application server 38 for accomplishing a variety of data communications. The illustrated example is well suited to handling situations where high data throughput is required for adequate application performance. The illustrated mobile station 22 includes a plurality of wireless access terminals 40, 42. In one example, the mobile station 22 comprises a notebook computer and the wireless access terminals 40 and 42 comprise commercially available air cards. One example wireless access terminal is known as the AirPrime 5220 PCMCIA EVDO air card. A variety of known techniques for coupling the wireless access terminals to the mobile station 22 can be used. In one example, the mobile station 22 already has more than one wireless access terminal. In another example, the terminals are selectively connected to the mobile station when desired.
Each wireless access terminal 40, 42 communicates over a physical traffic channel with the base station 26. In the illustrated example, the wireless access terminal 40 communicates over a first physical traffic channel 44 while the wireless access terminal 42 communicates over a second physical traffic channel 46. Each of the physical traffic channels carries at least one of voice or data packets, for example. Each of the physical traffic channels has a throughput capacity or bandwidth. In the illustrated example, combining the two physical traffic channels 44 and 46 into a single logical channel and using them at least partially simultaneously for transmitting a communication between the mobile station 22 and the base station 26 provides increased throughput capacity.
In one example, each physical traffic channel has a throughput rating of 153.6 Kbps. With the example arrangement, using the two wireless access terminals 40 and 42 and the combined physical traffic channels 44 and 46 (one channel per wireless access device) provides an aggregate throughput of approximately 289 Kbps for an FTP upload communication, for example. This example includes using the 1× EV-DO communication standard and appropriately configured wireless access terminals 40 and 42. Other communication standards or protocols are useful with this invention. EV-DO is provided as an example for discussion purposes. In one example, a different protocol is used on each of the channels 44 and 46.
With the combined physical traffic channels 44 and 46, the mobile station 22 is capable of communicating at a higher throughput than the communication system 20 otherwise would be able to provide. This example does not require altering the channels 44 or 46 in any manner and does not require altering the wireless network 24. One difference between the example wireless network 24 and some typical wireless networks is that the PDSN 34 is capable of handling the communications over the combined physical traffic channels by establishing corresponding R-P sessions for each of the combined channels.
It is important to recognize the difference between a physical traffic channel and a physical control channel. It is known to use a physical control channel (PDCCH) in combination with a physical traffic or data channel (PDDCH), for example. Such a combination does not increase the throughput of data or other traffic (i.e., a communication) on the data channel PDDCH. With the disclosed example embodiment of this invention, the combined physical traffic channels operate as if they were a single logical channel and provide an increased throughput that may be almost twice that of one of the physical channels, for example.
In one example, a known multilink PPP protocol is used for combining the physical traffic channels 44 and 46. As schematically shown in
In this example, the multilink PPP protocol resides over the corresponding R-P sessions at the interface between the radio network controller 32 and the PDSN 34. On the network side, the multilink PPP protocol 54 is responsible for recombining the split IP packet stream back into a single IP packet stream corresponding to the original communication (i.e., before being split using the multilink PPP protocol) from the mobile station 22.
Any application 50 that is run on top of the IP protocol 52 is unaffected by the multilink PPP protocol 54 and the multiple physical channels 44, 46. At the same time, however, the application 50 obtains an aggregate bandwidth or throughput from the combined physical traffic channels.
One example uses a multilink PPP protocol as described in IETF RFC 1990. Referring to
In one example, additional member links can join the bundle using LCP messages in a known manner by indicating an appropriate end point discriminator. Each member link setup also triggers establishment of corresponding physical traffic channels. Each member link can be released individually using LCP messages in a known manner. Alternatively, a bundle could be released as a whole.
No separate IPCP negotiation is required for each member link. The multilink bundle has unique IP protocol settings such as IP address, DNS address, etc. Once the multilink bundle is set up, the multilink PPP protocol adds a header in addition to the known PPP overhead to the packet, which includes a new protocol ID, a fragmentation indication and sequence numbers. These are used so that the end point on the receiving end can reassemble and resequence packets transmitted over a plurality of combined physical traffic channels.
As schematically shown in
Although the illustrated examples include two physical traffic channels, more than two could be used in an implementation of this invention. Effectively combining physical traffic channels into a single logical channel provides increased throughput capabilities so that a wider variety of data applications can be used with a wireless communication network.
The preceding description is exemplary rather than limiting in nature. Variations and modifications to the disclosed examples may become apparent to those skilled in the art that do not necessarily depart from the essence of this invention. The scope of legal protection given to this invention can only be determined by studying the following claims.
