Operators have recently resorted to WiFi offloading to deal with increasing data demand and induced congestion. Researchers have further suggested the use of “delayed offloading”: if no WiFi connection is available, (some) traffic can be delayed up to a given deadline, or until WiFi becomes available. Nevertheless, there is no clear consensus as to the benefits of delayed offloading, with a cou...

With the expected growth of mobile data traffic it is essential to manage the network resources efficiently. In order to undertake this challenge, we propose a framework for network-centric, mobile-assisted resource management, which facilitates traffic offloading from mobile network to Wi-Fi or open access small cells. A provision of desired quality of experience to the end-user is carried out...

Data offloading is the systematic transfer of data traffic from a cellular network to a complementary network such as Wi-Fi with the aim of reducing congestion on mobile networks and providing high speed connectivity for the users. Given the increasing heterogeneity of network traffic and constantly changing network conditions, one key challenge that operators face with data offloading mechanis...

With the rapid increase in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying wireless local area network (LAN) hotspots on which they can offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill the interests of mobile users (MUs). Taking into consideration many issues, MUs should be able to decide whe...

With the rapid growth of mobile traffic demand, a promising approach to relieve cellular network congestion is to offload users’ traffic to small-cell networks. In this paper, we investigate how the mobile users (MUs) can effectively offload traffic by taking advantage of the capability of dual-connectivity, which enables an MU to simultaneously communicate with a macro base station (BS) and a ...

Mobile data offloading through complementary network technologies such as WiFi and femtocell can significantly alleviate network congestion and enhance users’ QoS. In this paper we consider a market where mobile network operators (MNOs) lease third-party deployed WiFi or femtocell access points (APs) to dynamically offload the traffic of their mobile users. We assume that each MNO can employ mu...

Long Term Evolution (LTE) is defined by the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) standards as Release 8/9. The LTE supports at max 20 MHz channel bandwidth for a carrier. The number of LTE users and their applications are increasing, which increases the demand on the system BW. A new feature of the LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) which is defined in the 3GPP standards as Release 10/11 is called Car...

This paper investigates data traffic offloading by considering a third-party cognitive small cell with wireless powered user equipments (UEs) providing data traffic offloading service to a primary macrocell. The cognitive small cell is assumed to use remaining resources for its own purpose provided that the quality of service (QoS) of the primary macrocell is satisfied. It is assumed that the s...

In this paper, we propose different offloading scenarios, which help operators controlling the ever increasing of mobile data volumes over the femto and the macro cellular networks. We consider the Selected IP traffic offload (SIPTO) approach in order to selectively offload mobile IP traffic in order to use servers deployed within the metro network “at/above the RAN”. A quantitative study is ca...

The ever growing data traffic generated by users in cellular networks is becoming more challenging and straining for cellular operators. Thus, developing efficient mechanisms that enable cellular operators to offload data traffic from their networks in a cost-effective manner is essential. To this end, we propose a generic framework (MFW) that exploits femtocells and WiFi networks. The framewor...