Tight, Tighter and Very Tight Integration between LTE and WiFi Networks

For those who are unfamiliar about the trusted and non-trusted access, I strongly recommend reading our whitepaper on Cellular and WiFi Integration here.

The standard and the most popular Integration approach between LTE and Wi-Fi is via the Trusted architecture as shown above.

There is a proposal for RAN level Integration which would result in Even Tighter Integration of WiFi

Now some researchers are proposing a Very Tight coupling between LTE and Wi-Fi which would mean that regardless of the access, the UE can be sent data from the same data stream over WiFi and LTE. Though this is radical, these approaches are already being thought about for '5G'. Whether it will happen in a future release of 4G or 4.5G remains to be seen. Here is the complete paper embedded below:

Very Tight Coupling between LTE and Wi-Fi for Advanced Offloading Procedures from Zahid Ghadialy