Mobile Data Offloading Using Opportunistic Communication and AP Deployment: A Case Study

2.1. Mobile Data Offloading

Mobile data offloading also called as Wi-Fi offloading is the use of complementary network communication technologies to deliver mobile data traffic originally planned for transmission over Wi-Fi networks (“Mobile data offloading”, Wiki). Complementary network communication technologies include integrated mobile broadcast, Wi-Fi and femto cell. The amount of data which should be carried out on the cellular bands can be reduced by offloading scheme and also freeing bandwidth for other users. The primary source of mobile data traffic includes different internet applications, from browsers to video and audio streaming applications processing in smartphone devices, feature phones, tablets and laptops with 3G access capabilities. The popularity of social media, video and demand of internet gaming across a wide variety of new devices like smartphones and tablets has created a rush of network data traffic. Quick growth of smartphones, laptops and tablets, data traffic on the networks is increasing and mobile connections are predicted to reach 7.4 billion marks by 2015 striking the global population. According to Cisco’s survey, monthly global mobile data traffic will exceed 24.3 Exabyte by 2019 (“Cisco Visual Networking Index”, 2016). There are several solutions for mobile traffic offloading as discussed below:

Wifler can be used to augment 3G capabilities in cellular environments. Fast switching mechanism and leveraging delay tolerance concepts are used to overcome the performance and the poor availability of Wi-Fi (Balasubramanian et al., 2010). Line2 is an app which is used to utilize Wi-Fi, 3G and 4G data connections in mobile network (“Line2 iPhone application”). At first Line2 attempts to connect via a Wi-Fi network. iPass system gives access to the iPass cellular network which is the world’s vast trading Wi-Fi network (“iPassConnect”). MOTO Project is used to carry out the boundaries of 4G/LTE technologies in congested conditions (“MOTO: Mobile Opportunistic Traffic Offloading”, 2013). It also determines how opportunistic communication and networking can be used as a trustworthy way to offload some segment of the traffic from the 4G/LTE network.