Mobile Data Offloading for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

doi:10.1017/9781316771655.017

16 - Mobile Data Offloading for Heterogeneous Wireless Networks

from Part III - Network Protocols, Algorithms, and Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 April 2017

Haoran Yu and

Edited by

Derrick Wing Kwan Ng and

Li-Chun Wang

Show author details

Man Hon Cheung: Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Haoran Yu: Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Jianwei Huang: Affiliation:
The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong
Vincent W. S. Wong: Affiliation:
University of British Columbia, Vancouver
Robert Schober: Affiliation:
Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
Derrick Wing Kwan Ng: Affiliation:
University of New South Wales, Sydney
Li-Chun Wang: Affiliation:
National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan

Book contents

Get access

Summary

Introduction

According to Cisco's forecast [1], mobile data traffic will grow to 30.6 exabytes per month by 2020, which amounts to a nearly eight-fold increase between 2015 and 2020 globally. Such a huge amount of traffic is putting increasing pressure on the cellular network operators. On the other hand, traditional network expansion methods, such as acquiring more spectrum and upgrading to more advanced communication technologies such as Long Term Evolution (LTE)-Advanced, are often costly and time-consuming. An efficient way to increase the network capacity in a cost-effective and timely manner is to use complementary technologies, such asWi-Fi or small cells, to offload the traffic originally targeted toward the cellular network. In fact, Cisco showed that offloaded mobile data traffic exceeded cellular traffic for the first time in 2015, where 51% of the total mobile data traffic was offloaded to the fixed network through Wi-Fi or femtocell networks [1]. Owing to the popularity of Wi-Fi usage and deployment, we will focus our attention on the offloading of mobile data through Wi-Fi networks for the rest of this chapter.

In general, there are two main approaches to the initiation of Wi-Fi offloading, namely user-initiated and operator-initiated offloading. In the early days of implementation, when Wi-Fi networks were not tightly integrated with cellular networks, user-initiated offloading was the common choice, where the mobile users needed to manually select the network that they intended to use. However, in such a cellular and Wi-Fi coexistence scenario, the cellular operators usually lose their visibility of the users’ activities and thus cannot provide a guaranteed quality of experience (QoE) to users.

In contrast, with the ongoing standardization efforts that we will discuss in the next section, cellular and Wi-Fi networks are becoming increasingly tightly coupled together, so that the performance of the Wi-Fi network is usually within the mobile operator's control. This enables operator-initiated offloading, where the connection manager in a mobile device connects with the mobile operator's server and retrieves the mobile operator's policy to initiate the offloading procedure. In other words, the mobile operators have more control over the users’ network selections and thus their QoE under the operator-initiated offloading.

Type: Chapter
Information: Key Technologies for 5G Wireless Systems , pp. 358 - 379

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316771655.017 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2017

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Book purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

[1] Cisco Systems, “Cisco visual networking index: Global mobile data traffic forecast update, 2015–2020,” White Paper, Feb. 2016.

[2] M., Paolini, “Wi-Fi and cellular integration: From Wi-Fi offload to HetNets,” White Paper, 2014.

[3] Alcatel-Lucent and British Telecommunications, “Wi-Fi roaming: Building on ANDSF and Hotspot2.0,” White Paper, 2012.

[4] 4G Americas, “Integration of cellular and Wi-Fi networks,” White Paper, Sep. 2013.

[5] Ruckus Wireless, “How interworking works: A detailed look at 802.11u and Hotspot 2.0 mechanism,” White Paper, 2013.

[6] Wireless Broadband Alliance, “WISPr 2.0,” Specification, 2010.

[7] 4G Americas, “LTE aggregation and unlicensed spectrum,” White Paper, Nov. 2015.

[8] A. J., Nicholson and B. D., Noble, “BreadCrumbs: Forecasting mobile connectivity,” in Proc. of ACM International Conf. on Mobile Computing and Networking (MobiCom), Sep. 2008.

[9] M. L., Puterman, Markov Decision Processes: Discrete Stochastic Dynamic Programming. Wiley, 2005.

[10] M. H., Ngo and V., Krishnamurthy, “Optimality of threshold policies for transmission scheduling in correlated fading channels,” IEEE Trans. Commun., vol. 57, no. 8, pp. 2474–2483, Aug. 2009.Google Scholar

[11] D. P., Bertsekas, Dynamic Programming and Optimal Control, Volume 1, 3rd edn. Athena Scientific, 2005.

[12] M. H., Cheung and J., Huang, “DAWN: Delay-aware Wi-Fi offloading and network selection,” IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 33, no. 6, pp. 1214–1223, Jun. 2015.Google Scholar

[13] K., Lee, I., Rhee, J., Lee, S., Chong, and Y., Yi, “Mobile data offloading: How much can WiFi deliver?” in Proc. of ACM CoNEXT, Nov. 2010.

[14] A., Balasubramanian, R., Mahajan, and A., Venkataramani, “Augmenting mobile 3G using WiFi,” in Proc. of ACM International Conf. on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (MobiSys), Jun. 2010.

[15] Wikipedia, “4G.” Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4.

[16] “IEEE, IEEE 802.11.” Available at http://standards.ieee.org/getieee802/download/ 802.11-2007.pdf.

[17] A., Fehske, G., Fettweis, J., Malmodin, and G., Biczók, “The global footprint of mobile communications: The ecological and economic perspective,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 49, no. 8, pp. 55–62, Aug. 2011.Google Scholar

[18] E., Oh, B., Krishnamachari, X., Liu, and Z., Niu, “Toward dynamic energy-efficient operation of cellular network infrastructure,” IEEE Commun. Mag., vol. 49, no. 6, pp. 56–61, Jun. 2011.Google Scholar

[19] J., Huang, V. G., Subramanian, R., Agrawal, and R. A., Berry, “Downlink scheduling and resource allocation for OFDM systems,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 288–296, Jan. 2009.Google Scholar

[20] H., Yu, M. H., Cheung, L., Huang, and J., Huang, “Power–delay tradeoff with predictive scheduling in integrated cellular andWi-Fi networks,” IEEE J. Sel. Areas Commun., vol. 34, no. 4, pp. 735–742, Apr. 2016.Google Scholar

[21] L., Huang and M. J., Neely, “Max-weight achieves the exact [O(1/V),O(V)] utility–delay tradeoff under Markov dynamics,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1008.0200, 2010.