Efficient Mobile Data Offloading Using WiFi Access Points

The wide-spread proliferation of smartphone-like devices has caused a tremendous increase in mobile data usage unmatched by the slower increasing available bandwidth. Consequently, this has caused severe traffic overloading in cellular networks. An immediate available remedy for this problem is offloading the traffic through WiFi access points. In this paper, we study the deployment and recruitment of WiFi access points (AP) in a metropolitan area for efficient offloading of mobile data traffic. We analyze a large scale real user mobility traces and propose a deployment algorithm based on the density of user data access requests. With simulation results, we demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve close to optimal offloading ratio that is higher than offloading ratios achievable by the existing algorithms using the same number of APs. Moreover, we also show that remarkably high offloading ratios can be achieved through recruitment of APs available in the area without new deployments.