Ti-Fi: Terminal-to-terminal communication incorporated Wi-Fi offloading

Wi-Fi is a cost-effective way to offload the increasing data traffic from cellular networks. However, users can only associate to one access point (AP) at a time, which limits the offloading performance in multiple hotspots scenario. In order to enhance the offloading performance and improve the utilization of Wi-Fi capacity as well, we propose a terminal-to-terminal (T2T) communication incorporated Wi-Fi offloading (Ti-Fi), where two neighboring users can assist each other to offload data via T2T communication and their Wi-Fi connections. We analyze the proposed Ti-Fi scheme by employing the M/G/1/K queueing model and evaluate the offloading performance. We show that the T2T communication can improve the Wi-Fi offloading efficiency by up to 21% and reduce the cellular traffic by up to 80% with very short extra delay. The results in this paper provide important guidelines on efficiently deploying Wi-Fi networks and choosing T2T pairs to improve the offloading performance.