Investigation of throughput gains by mobile data offloading from LTE to Wi-Fi

Recently, there has been a tremendous increase in mobile data usage with widespread proliferation of smartphone like devices and increasing popularity of video streaming services such as YouTube. This is already causing overloading of 3G cellular access networks. It is estimated that even the 4G LTE (Long Term Evolution) technology which has significantly higher spectral efficiency than 3G will also face overloading in near future. As a result, it has become important to find out ways and means of offloading the traffic from the LTE network. One possible solution is offloading it to Wi-Fi to gain extra capacity and improve overall network performance. In this paper we have considered an outdoor macro cell LTE Network being offloaded by a Wi-Fi network. We study the loading of LTE Network in different types of user and traffic distribution and investigate how offload to Wi-Fi APs can help in easing the congestion in LTE network and thereby lead to better per user throughputs and better quality of experience to end users using NS-3. Also, among the various scheduling algorithms that have been defined for efficient resource allocation in LTE, three schedulers have been considered: Round Robin (RR), Proportional Fair (PF) and Priority Set Scheduler (PSS) schedulers and their performance has been evaluated in the offloading scenario.