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Optimized Wi-Fi Offloading Scheme for High User Density in LTE Networks

Thamary Alruhaili 1, Ghadah Aldabbagh 1, Fatma Bouabdallah2, Nikos Dimitriou3, Moe Win 4
1. Computer Science Department, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King AbdulAziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
2. Information Technology Department, Faculty of Computing and Information Technology, King AbdulAziz University, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia
3. Institute of Informatics and Telecommunications, NCSR Demokritos, Athens, Greece
4. Laboratory for Information & Decision Systems, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA

Abstract—Mobile networks are facing the growing flood of Internet data, as stated by Cisco. Indeed, the traffic from smart phones is expected to grow from 92 percent to 99 percent by 2021. Therefore, new solutions must be conceived by vendors and mobile operators to reduce network congestion with a low cost to preserve customers. This issue is even more critical with mass events, which occur once a year, such as hajj, festivals and football games at stadiums. Half of smartphones and over 90% of 4G enabled laptops and notebook PCs are already Wi-Fi enabled. Hundreds of millions ubiquitous Wi-Fi access points provide large enough complementary capacity space for mobile networks. Thus, a novel mechanism for Wi-Fi offloading must be explored with the purpose of finding a suitable cell association method to assign users to the best tier. This can be done by considering suitable approaches to manage the network selection method, to gain the expected capacity enhancement. In this paper, we propose a new offloading algorithm called, Optimized Wi-Fi offloading algorithm, based on an optimization cost function. This Optimized Wi-Fi offloading algorithm, not only optimizes three important criteria in balancing the load, but also it can guarantee a Quality of Service (QoS) to the successfully connected user to any tier based on required service. Simulation results prove the expected capacity enhancement, by comparing the performance of the Optimized Wi-Fi Offloading with another tow offloading Algorithms. The first algorithm is Wi-Fi if Coverage, second, Fixed SNR threshold.

Index Terms—Capacity, LTE, Network selection, QoS, Wi-Fi Offloading.

Cite: Thamary Alruhaili, Ghadah Aldabbagh, Fatma Bouabdallah, Nikos Dimitriou, and Moe Win, " Optimized Wi-Fi Offloading Scheme for High User Density in LTE Networks," Journal of Communications, vol. 14, no. 3, pp. 179-186, 2019. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.14.3.179-186.