Feature-Rich Interworking Architecture for Mobile Traffic Offloading
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2018-04-05
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Addis Ababa University
Abstract
We are in the age where mobile devices have become an indispensable part of our lives. They bring
applications and services anytime and anywhere. The applications and services rely, mainly, on our
cellular data plans. As the cellular infrastructure is more reliable and has better coverage, it
shoulders the majority of user traffic globally. Due to that it is getting overburdened and is forcing
customers to go on complaining about poor performances. Though there are many alternative
solutions for service providers to choose from, mobile traffic offloading is regarded as affordable
and better as a short term solution due to many reasons. Less or no modification to existing
infrastructure, availability of the required enabling technologies in existing mobile devices, and price
worthiness of the initial investment and operational cost are among the reasons that appeal to both
operators and customers.
Therefore, in this research work a feature-rich interworking architecture is proposed for the purpose
of mobile traffic offloading. It is fully-integrated, hybrid and Quality of Service -aware. It integrates
three different wireless technologies, namely, cellular, wireless local area network and device-todevice
communication. Moreover, it has multiple links between the cellular and the other two
networks: very tight and loose couplings. In addition, it supports both delay tolerant and delay
sensitive traffic types. On top of that, a traffic offloading algorithm is devised that can monitor the
instantaneous network conditions and decide through which specific path to en-route the packets
while fulfilling the Quality of Service demand of the initiated data traffic.
The implementation is done using the NS3 simulation tool followed by performance evaluation
using six key performance metrics. Packet loss ratio, end-to-end delay, jitter, packet delivery ratio,
offloading ratio and handover delay are the applied metrics.
The results obtained are very much promising and encouraging. For instance, it is found that up to
90% of delay tolerant traffic and above 50% of delay sensitive traffic can be offloaded from the
cellular network towards the wireless local area and device-to-device connections.
Though the results obtained may not be conclusive the various performance indicators demonstrated
the huge potential of such a feature-rich interworking architecture with many possible future
improvements.
Description
Keywords
Mobile Traffic Offloading, Network Architecture, Heterogeneous Networks, Network Performance Measurement, Ns3