RAN for multimedia delivery

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-10512015-B2
Application number	US-201916243002-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	Jan 8, 2019
Priority date	Sep 8, 2015
Publication date	Dec 17, 2019
Grant date	Dec 17, 2019

Abstract

A method is disclosed for avoiding unnecessary keepalive data transfers, comprising: receiving, at an upstream TCP connection endpoint in a radio access network (RAN) from an operator core network, an Internet Protocol (IP) packet; performing, at the upstream TCP connection endpoint, shallow packet inspection on the IP packet; and forwarding the IP packet to the downstream TCP connection endpoint in the RAN if the IP packet is not a keepalive packet, based on the performed shallow packet inspection. The upstream TCP connection endpoint in the RAN may be one of a nodeB, an eNodeB, a base transceiver station (BTS), a coordinating server, and a mobile edge computing (MEC) gateway. The downstream TCP connection endpoint in the RAN may be one of the nodeB, the eNodeB, or the base transceiver station (BTS).

First claim

The invention claimed is:

1. A method comprising:
receiving, at an upstream gateway node, a video data flow;
sending, from the upstream gateway node, the video data flow to a Radio Access Network (RAN);
receiving, at the upstream gateway node, a congestion control message from the RAN based on a request for retransmission of a portion of the video data flow at the RAN to a User Equipment (UE);
determining, at the upstream gateway node, via shallow packet inspection on the portion of the video data flow, that the portion of the video data flow is not a message containing no content and is not a request for acknowledgement to keep a connection alive; and
performing, at the upstream gateway node, flow control of the video data flow based on the congestion control message.

2. The method of claim 1 further comprising buffering, at the upstream gateway node, the video data flow.

3. The method of claim 1 wherein the congestion control message is received at the upstream gateway node using an X2 Application Protocol (X2AP) message.

4. The method of claim 1 wherein the congestion control message comprises a message indicating that: a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) request was received at the RAN; that a radio modulation change is imminent; that a signal to noise ratio at an eNodeB for the UE has crossed a threshold; or that a UE is expected to perform a handover.

5. The method of claim 1 wherein performing, at the upstream gateway node, flow control may comprise: avoiding video retransmissions and backoff; buffering the video data flow; or sending video retransmission requests to cause the video data flow to be regulated at a particular data rate.

6. The method of claim 1 further comprising maintaining, at the upstream gateway node, a transport control protocol (TCP) timer for performing flow control of the video data flow; and maintaining, at the RAN, a hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) timer.

7. The method of claim 1 further comprising performing transcoding or transrating of the video data flow at the upstream gateway node.

Assignees

• Parallel Wireless Inc

Inventors

• Lubenski Zeev
• Arora Jitender

Classifications

• H04L2001/0097

  Relays · CPC title

• H04L1/1874

  Buffer management · CPC title

• H04W88/16

  Gateway arrangements · CPC title

• H04L1/1893

  Physical mapping arrangements (physical resource mapping in general H04L5/00) · CPC title

• H04W84/042

  Public Land Mobile systems, e.g. cellular systems · CPC title