Cellular traffic offloading through network-assisted ad-hoc routing in cellular networks

Mobile communication and data services face a rapid growth and result in an ever increasing demand of bandwidth. As alternative to investing in the infrastructure by splitting cells down to nano or pico scale, this paper introduces and evaluates a concept for traffic data offloading to ad-hoc communication in terms of device-to-device communication. The idea is to combine infrastructure-aided route discovery with local mobile ad-hoc network communication to handle traffic with a local focus, i.e. intra-cell or neighbouring-cell traffic. We analyse the concept in terms of latencies and packet delivery ratio by using Omnet++ simulations. We demonstrate that the approach comes with low overhead and allows for an efficient distribution of traffic depending on the expected communication range.