Traffic offload technology has been attracting attention in recent years due to efforts made to improve revenues and reduce costs by efficiently handling increases in mobile traffic from mobile network operators as a means of reducing operating costs and improving user experiences. Mobile operators can reduce traffic traversing mobile core networks through offload technology and end-users can o...

An unprecedented increase in the mobile data traffic volume has been recently reported due to the extensive use of smartphones, tablets and laptops. Moreover, predictions say that this increase is going to be yet more pronounced in the next 3-4 years. This is a major concern for mobile network operators, who are forced to often operate very close to (or even beyond) their capacity limits. Recen...

The widespread diffusion of mobile phones is triggering an exponential growth of mobile data traffic that is likely to cause, in the near future, considerable traffic overload issues even in last-generation cellular networks. Offloading part of the traffic to other networks is considered a very promising approach and, in particular, in this paper we consider offloading through opportunistic net...

In cellular traffic offloading through opportunistic mobile networks, existing schemes rely on the assumption that data can be entirely transmitted at each contact. However, transmission probability exponentially decreases as data size increases. That is, the contact duration in each contact might be insufficient for delivering large data. The objective of this paper is to find an optimal traff...

The rapid advances in networking, mobile computing, and virtualization, lead to a dramatic increase in the traffic demand. A cost-effective solution for serving it, while maintaining a good quality of service (QoS), would be to offload a part of the traffic originally targeted for cellular base stations (BSs) to a WiFi infrastructure. Related work on the WiFi offloading often considers markets ...

Cellular networks are facing severe traffic overloads due to the proliferation of smart handheld devices and traffic hungry applications. This paper tries to offload the cellular network traffic through Opportunistic Communications and Social Participation formed by the short-range communication technologies in the smart phones (e.g., Wi-Fi, Bluetooth). We design an Enhanced Greedy algorithm fo...

Mobile data offloading leverages more affordable or even free network capacity to reduce the traffic experienced by cellular operators through their limited over-the-air resources. One way to harvest free capacity is to employ the white space, namely, frequencies that are assigned to licensed users but are not actively utilized, as long as no harmful interference is generated. In this article, ...

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) offloading is an important approach to address the data traffic challenge faced by Long Term Evolution (LTE) network. Legacy offloading solutions based on the core network suffer from the limitations of load unbalance and user experience degradation. To solve this problem, 3GPP has recently proposed a radio access network (RAN) assisted WLAN offloading scheme....