QoS-aware and policy based mobile data offloading

• Main Author: Amani, Mojdeh
• Other Authors: Aghvami, Abdol-Hamid
• Published: King's College London (University of London) 2014
• Subjects: 004
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.677052

The rapid growth in the number of 3G/4G enabled devices such as smart-phones and tablets has created exceptional demand for ubiquitous connectivity and high quality applications. As a result, cellular networks are struggling to keep up with this explosive demand for data traffic. The emergence to LTE has boosted cellular network throughput; however these improvements are not sufficient given the limited availability of licensed spectrum. To meet the requirements of capacity-hungry applications, Wi-Fi offloading has been intensively researched as an essential approach to alleviate the mobile data traffic load on cellular network by providing extra capacity and improving overall performance. The offloading algorithms should be evaluated and compared to steer Wi-Fi offloading to increase the combined throughput and network performance of LTE and Wi-Fi access technologies connected to the evolved packet core (EPC) with at least the baseline case of having all the data traffic in LTE. In this thesis, novel off-loading algorithms are proposed and implemented to address challenges in Wi-Fi loading to LTE networks and provide solutions when performance needs exceed the capability of the LTE access network. In the design of such smart offloading techniques, important issues such as scalability and stability are being considered. Through an extensive set of simulations, the performance of the proposed techniques is thoroughly investigated focusing on the figure of merits that affects user experience. The end-to-end throughput that a flow can accomplish, offloading efficiency and packet dropping rate are examined. Furthermore, these evaluations have demonstrated that offloading users from LTE to Wi-Fi reduces burden on the LTE network without affecting user experience. Also it is shown that the mobile communication architecture can be improved further by applying the principles of Software-Defined Networking (SDN) with providing logically centralized control of the overall infrastructure, and enabling programmability.