Proximity-aware offloading of person-to-person communications in LTE networks

This paper presents a simple policy to immediately reduce the overall core network's interpersonal voice/data traffic of nearly 15% on average in highly populated urban areas. This remarkable result can be achieved without resorting to complementary radio technologies, but by adding a few basic functionalities that simply rely on enabling the mobile operator to be aware of the fact that people are interacting by mobile phone in proximity. As a first contribution of this paper we give empirical evidence of the role played by these short-range social interactions through an extensive analysis of the large anonymized datasets of Call Detail Records (CDR) of two different mobile operators. Then, we describe a NFV/SDN-based approach that a mobile operator should adopt to detect whether a voice/text activity is directed to a nearby person, to negotiate with adjacent cells the establishment of the communication channel and to divert the traffic over it to offload the core network.