What does VoWi-Fi bring to the voice communication experience in the LTE age?

What does VoWi-Fi bring to the voice communication experience in the LTE age?

In the Internet era, users have high requirements on business experience, including voice services. To some extent, this can be explained that compared with the global LTE construction climax, the VoLTE business is growing more slowly. As the first telecom-level public voice service, VoLTE puts forward high requirements on the operator's network. Compared with some technical problems, LTE network coverage is prominent. From the perspective of some commercial VoLTE markets, it was not fully rolled out at the beginning, but gradually developed based on the actual situation of LTE network deployment in various regions. In these markets, Although LTE coverage and switching to 3G network functions are relatively complete, there are still some areas (such as indoors) that make the VoLTE experience not perfect.

According to market Research's ABI Research, the number of Wi-Fi hotspot deployments worldwide will increase to 2015 by 7.1 million, in addition, we will continue to maintain a compound annual growth rate of 2013 between 2018 and 15%, by which time we will exceed 0.105 billion. These extensive Wi-Fi hotspots greatly improve the Internet experience. Can these Wi-Fi hotspots improve the voice communication experience in the LTE era?

What is the difference between VoWi-Fi and the past?

The iphone 6 released in 2014 has once again attracted attention from the VoWi-Fi technology that appeared many years ago. If we only talk about carrying voice services on Wi-Fi, the heat of attention will soon dissipate. VoWi-Fi without telecom-level service experience support will only exist in niche markets and cannot be truly integrated into the public communication system.

VoLTE uses IMS as the core control architecture. IMS is widely regarded as a technical architecture that will support all types of access in the future. It is the technical basis for the convergence of fixed and mobile networks. As an open control architecture, IMS was able to provide unified services to all types of access networks through a unified platform for the first time in the communication history. According to 3GPP standards, various access technologies including Wi-Fi have been considered in the 3GPP access architecture.

In 3GPP specifications, Wi-Fi access is considered as a non-3GPP wireless access type. operators can regard it as a trusted network and a non-trusted network based on actual conditions. For these two types of networks, 3GPP introduces two new network elements:

● Evolved Packet Data Gateway (ePDG)-used for untrusted Wi-Fi network access

● Trusted Wireless Access Gateway (TWAG)-used to trust Wi-Fi network Access

The above architecture solves the following important problems for a Wi-Fi network to access the 3GPP network:

Security Access Problems of user terminals: authentication of terminals by setting up AAA servers and using HSS

Secure Transmission of business flows: security technologies such as encryption protocol and tunnel are used between Wi-Fi terminals to ePDG or AP to TWAG.

Business continuity during network switching: IP addresses of user terminals are uniformly allocated through PGW

From the above architecture, we can see that VoWi-Fi provided telecom-grade voice services in the public communication network in a secure access, centralized authentication, and guaranteed service quality mode for the first time.

Benefits of VoWi-Fi

Provides mobile and continuous telecom-grade voice services between LTE base stations and Wi-Fi hotspots (or even out of LTE coverage)

Easy to use, automatic network discovery and authentication

The powerful security architecture ensures secure and reliable Wi-Fi-based access.

Through Wi-Fi access, you can also get discounts on carrier fees.

Benefits of VoWi-Fi for carriers

Increased network coverage and network access capacity: carriers or virtual operators can selectively connect all kinds of Wi-Fi hotspots that have been widely deployed to their mobile networks quickly and securely.

Improve user service experience and increase user stickiness

Service Access is optimized to distribute roaming services or video services with high bandwidth requirements through Wi-Fi.

The capability to extend services to the Wi-Fi access network allows operators to manage various terminals connected through Wi-Fi.