A Study of the Effects on QoS in WiFi-Cellular Offloading Scenarios

Abstract

Nowadays the mobile data usage has been significantly increased by an unprecedented amount with the wide spread of smart devices, which is known as the explosion of data traffic. The rapid growth in mobile data traffic leads to a deficiency of cellular network capacity. To solve this problem, readily available Wi-Fi networks are used to offload the data traffic from cellular networks. The Wi-Fi offloading must ensure guaranteed throughput and delay performance for the users. However, if the user doesn’t meet any Wi-Fi network during the download period, the quality of experience gets degraded. Quality of experience can be improved with the help of various techniques such as resource allocation, scheduling, and handoff schemes. To know the effect of the offloading process, some key parameters are identified in this paper and the effect of offloading on these parameters is studied. Here, in this paper a study of various parameters like download time, number of users, data size on the throughput, delay and packet loss is done in the cellular network -WiFi offloading scenarios. This study highlights the need for an efficient QoS mechanism in future heterogeneous networks. It can be considered as a research aspect in upcoming integrated networks.