Mobile data offloading through a third-party WiFi access point: An operator´s perspective

WiFi offloading is regarded as one of the most promising techniques to deal with the explosive data increase in the existing cellular network due to its high data transmission rate, and low requirement on devices. In this paper, we investigate the mobile data offloading problem through a third-party WiFi access point (AP) for a cellular mobile system. From the cellular operator´s perspective, by assuming the data offloaded through the third-party WiFi AP is charged based on usage, we formulate mobile data offloading problem as a utility maximization problem, which is an integer programming problem. A centralized mobile data offloading scheme is then obtained by considering its relaxation problem. It is strictly proved that the proposed centralized data offloading scheme is near-optimal when the number of users is large. Then, to relieve the computing burden on the cellular base station, we propose a threshold-based distributed data offloading scheme. We show that the proposed distributed scheme performs very well once the threshold is properly chosen.