Traffic offloading for 5G: L-LTE or Wi-Fi

Abstract

To cope with increasing mobile data traffic, researchers are currently working on traffic offloading techniques for delivering data over unlicensed cellular bands. Current offloading schemes based on offloading data to Wi-Fi regardless Wi-Fi has sufficient throughput or not. Though, we propose a novel offloading technique based on the Remaining Throughput Scheme (RTS) for Wi-Fi selection. In our proposed RTS technique, data is offloaded from the Unlicensed Long-Term Evolution (U-LTE) network such as Pico/Femto cells or Programmable Base Stations (PBSs) to Wi-Fi Access Points. Further, we propose Distance-based Transfer (DT) and Speed-based Transfer (ST) schemes to transfer users from PBS to Wi-Fi or Licensed LTE (L-LTE) Base Stations (BSs), where the transfer process relies on distance and speed of users, respectively. In this paper, the following three important issues relating to facilitating this transfer are addressed: which Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) should be selected to transfer users, which U-LTE users should be transferred to Wi-Fi, and which U-LTE users should be transferred to L-LTE. Network performance will increase by using RTS, DT and ST schemes as per the analytical evaluations presented.