Energy Consumption Impact from Wi-Fi Traffic Offload

To handle the increasing demand for data traffic, mobile network operators are integrating Wi-Fi access points into their networks in order to increase capacity at low cost. For the user experience the increased capacity is positive, but the impact on battery life time is crucial to gain wide acceptance for the use of multiple radio interfaces. In this paper the energy consumption of a mobile device during offload from LTE to Wi-Fi is analyzed for some typical services. Based on reported energy consumption of a few commercially available devices we conclude that the battery life time is not any major problem for efficient integration of Wi-Fi and 3GPP networks.