An energy-efficient WiFi offloading model in a heterogeneous network

Abstract

In this paper, we model power consumption of a heterogeneous network consisting of overlapped cellular and WiFi networks. Then, we propose a novel WiFi offloading model for maximizing per-user energy efficiency in terms of bps per Joule. In the proposed WiFi offloading model, the heterogeneous network gathers user information and decides which portion of generated per-user traffic should be transmitted via WiFi networks in order to maximize the per-user energy efficiency; the heterogeneous network informs users of this portion, i.e, WiFi offloading ratio. Finally, each user offloads the traffic from the cellular network by the WiFi offloading ratio. Consequently, a user and the heterogeneous network achieve more than 20% higher energy efficiency than the conventional WiFi offloading model in a dense traffic environment through the proposed WiFi offloading model.