Strategies for effective converged control of LTE and Wi-Fi networks

The booming of mobile communications has brought operators to face the issue to improve network capacity utilization to provide high quality of experience to end users. One way to exploit efficiently the available network capacity is mobile data offloading, which allows network operators to reduce congestion by offloading some traffic to other operators' networks, possibly based on different technologies, e.g. Long Term Evolution (LTE) or Wi-Fi. In this work, we focus on Operational Expenditures (OpEx) by defining, for a network operator, a cost metric accounting for the utilization of network infrastructure (e.g., associated to energy cost) and a “roaming cost” (i.e., the cost of offloading certain amount of traffic). Upon this, we define an optimization problem minimizing the overall OpEx for an operator, while guaranteeing the provisioning of traffic demands. We make the analysis from the perspective of an LTE network operator, which has the opportunity to offload traffic to either Wi-Fi Access Points, LTE small cells, or to LTE unlicensed spectrum. We study how mobile data offloading enables the reduction of network congestion and minimizes its OpEx.