VOPP: A VANET offloading potential prediction model

Abstract

In this work, we investigate upon the potential of considering the Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) for cellular traffic offloading as an alternative to Wi-Fi and femtoCells approaches. We propose an analytical study based on an optimization problem formulation called VOPP where the objective is to elect the maximum number of data flows that could be routed to the downloaders through the Vehicular Network (VANET). VOPP considers the link availability between the infrastructure and the downloader, the medium contention, interferences, data volume, gateways capacity and the channel aggregation to evaluate the VANET capacity to support additional traffics. Numerical results of our analytical approach show that the data offloading fraction is closely tied to the data volume of the flows and to the vehicles positions and VANET topology.