Traffic scheduling and power allocations for mobile data offloading via dual-connectivity

In this paper, we investigate how the mobile users (MUs) can effectively offload traffic by taking advantage of the capability of dual-connectivity, which enables an MU to simultaneously communicate with a macro base station (BS) and a small-cell access point (AP) via two radio-interfaces. We formulate an optimization problem that jointly determines each MU's traffic schedule (between the BS and AP) and power allocations (between two radio-interfaces), with the objective to minimize all MUs' total cost. We first propose an effective scheme to characterize the feasibility of the joint optimization problem. Then, by exploiting the layered structure, we propose an efficient layered scheme to solve it. Numerical results are provided to validate the proposed schemes and show the performance gain via properly offloading MUs' traffic via dual-connectivity.