Performance Improvement of Data Offloading using Multi-rate IEEE 802.11 WLAN

The WiFi offloading has emerged as a solution to mitigate the surge of traffic in cellular networks. The design of WiFi networks and the placement of Access Points (APs) has a considerable impact on the overall performance and the corresponding capital and operational expenditure (CAPEX/OPEX). Therefore, the minimum required number of APs without severe performance degradation is one of the challenges in WiFi offloading. In this paper, we investigate the impact of multi-rate WiFi APs on the offloading performance. A numerical analysis is presented to compare the minimum required number of APs in two modes of single-rate and multi-rate of IEEE 802.11 WLAN. The analysis results indicate the privilege of multi-rate WiFi AP when compared to single-rate WiFi AP. Moreover, the evaluation results show that required WiFi APs in multi-rate are 30% less than single rate WiFi APs.