Fujitsu Laboratories announced the development of connection control technology for LTE and Wi-Fi to boost communication speed in areas with Wi-Fi.

When devices doing high-load communications tasks, such as streaming videos, are concentrated on a single Wi-Fi access point, deterioration in communications speed for each of these devices is a problem. Up to this point, devices have been equipped with technology to enable them to choose a communications route to mitigate communication speed deterioration, such as connecting to LTE instead of Wi-Fi when the Wi-Fi's communication quality is poor. However, as each device determines its communications route independently, without considering the impact on other devices, this can instead cause overall communications speed to decrease.

Fujitsu Laboratories has developed connection control technology that uses a cloud-based connection control ability to predict communications speed when multiple devices change their connection at the same time, and can automatically set communication routes for multiple devices on the same Wi-Fi access point all at once based on that prediction. As a result of performance evaluations of this technology carried out by changing the distribution of devices using a telecommunications carrier's LTE network, it was confirmed that this technology can increase communications speed by about a factor of two, on average, compared with previous technology. With this technology, mobile users can even more easily make use of services that require high communications speeds, such as videos.

With this technology, by installing a dedicated application on a device, the server can control each device, but because devices without the application are also using Wi-Fi and LTE wireless resources, the amount of wireless resources available to controlled devices can change. Therefore, the dedicated application installed on the controlled device first collects information on current communication speeds and wireless quality, and notifies the connection control function on the control server. The connection control function then calculates the communication speed if there were sufficient usable wireless resources from the wireless quality information, and by comparing this with the actual communication speed, estimates the volume of usable wireless resources. This then enables connection control that responds to the situation in that location.

Fujitsu Laboratories aims to conduct even larger-scale field trials using this technology to improve its stability, with the goal of commercializing it in fiscal 2018. Also, Fujitsu Laboratories intends to move forward on expanding functions to enable selection of radio access technologies for 5G, aiming for application from fiscal 2020 onwards.