Programmable policies for data offloading in LTE network

Abstract

Mobile data offloading on smaller cells such as Wi-Fi comes as a natural solution to boost cellular networks capacity and keep up with the rapid increase of mobile data traffic demand. In this paper, we propose an offloading mechanism through the abstraction of Software-defined Networking (SDN) in the mobile backhaul to provide programmable offloading policy derivation that are aware of users and applications as well as the condition of wireless network. The proposed mechanism considers the real-time network condition to derive the offloading policies and efficiently accommodate the traffic in both LTE and Wi-Fi networks. Numerical results prove that the proposed approach can significantly improves dropping rate of the incoming traffic with using more real-time and dynamic decisions for offloading.