On the feasibility of WiFi offloading in urban areas: The Paris case study

With the increasing number of users subscribing to mobile Internet such as 3G and 4G networks, the Wireless Internet Services providers (WISP) aim to offer a good service for customers while elevating the number of clients. Several proposals to offload the traffic of 3G networks have been made in the past few years, including the use of femtocells,WiFi offloading and more recently mobile-to-mobile opportunistic offloading. In this paper, we measure the public WiFi hotspots provided by the government and private WiFi access points (AP) scanned during several bus routes in Paris in order to evaluate the feasibility of offloading data traffic through WiFi. We compare the AP positions with the positions of mobile clients provided publicly in Location Sharing Services, such as Foursquare. Our main findings are that, on average, an access point is available up to 60m of range, during 30 seconds, and the already deployed WiFi infrastructure could offload up to 30% of mobile traffic in the scenario analyzed.