Control and data plane solutions for carrier-aggregation based WLAN offload

An evolved Node B eNodeB, comprising:

• physical-layer circuitry that provides a primary network interface to communicate with a primary network in accordance with a 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) or LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) standard, the primary network interface providing a Radio Resource Control (RRC) protocol layer;
• physical-layer circuitry that provides a secondary network interface to communicate with a secondary network, wherein the secondary network interface is operably coupled to a Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) transceiver, and wherein the secondary network is a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) operating according to a standard from the IEEE 802.11 standards family;
• and
• physical-layer circuitry to offload data flows from the primary network to the secondary network using an aggregation function, the aggregation function to transfer data in the data flows with operations that:
• offload data from the primary network interface to a data flow within the secondary network interface based on network condition measurements in the primary network, wherein the offload of data is controlled by
• signaling received from the RRC protocol layer, and wherein the offload of data occurs at a user plane layer of the primary network interface;
• and
• tunnel the data from a Layer 2 level of the primary network interface, via the secondary network using the secondary network interface;
• wherein the tunneled data on the secondary network is identifiable as offloaded from the primary network.

At least one non-transitory machine-readable medium, comprising a plurality of instructions that, responsive to being executed with circuitry of a machine, cause the machine to perform operations that:

• provide an aggregation function configured to transfer data between a primary network interface of a primary network and a secondary network interface of a secondary network, wherein the secondary network interface is operably coupled to a Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) transceiver, and wherein the secondary network is a Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) operating according to a standard from the IEEE 802.11 standards family;
• offload data from a primary data flow within the primary network interface based on network condition measurements in the primary network, by transferring the data to a secondary data flow within the secondary network interface using the aggregation function, wherein the offload of data is controlled by signaling received from a Radio Resource Control (RRC) protocol layer in the primary network interface, and wherein the offload of data occurs at a user plane layer of the primary network interface;
• and
• tunnel the data from a Layer 2 level of the primary network interface, via the secondary data flow over the secondary network, using the secondary network interface;
• wherein the tunneled data is identifiable as offloaded from the primary network.