Performance Analysis of Packets Offloading Scheme Based on Software-Defined Open HetNets Platform

Following the huge popularization of smartphones and the ensuing explosion of mobile data traffic, cellular networks (LTE) are currently overloaded and this is foreseen to worsen in the near future. While operators continue to rely on their cellular networks to provide wide-area coverage, they are eager to find complementary alternatives to ease the mobile data traffic pressure, especially in areas where subscriber density is very high. Recently, different solutions have been proposed to overcome this problem. Among those solutions, WiFi offloading is the most promising technique for addressing the mobile data explosion issue. However, the LTE-WiFi heterogeneous (HetNets) feature not only complicates the traffic offloading scheme design, but also imposes significant challenges in system-level simulations and evaluations. Lack of innovations in offloading schemes and in simulation techniques will no doubt slow down the evolving and standardization process of next generation cellular systems. Therefore, in this paper, based on the software-defined open HetNets platform, we propose an analytical model to analyze the dual path packets offloading scheme in realistic LTE-WiFi HetNets scenario. Specifically, we first construct the software-defined open HetNets platform. Based on the open HetNets platform, we propose an analytical model for packets offloading in LTE/WiFi HetNets scenario, and derive the mean transmission delay, offloading efficiency, and other metrics of interest, as a function of the key network parameters. The offloading experiment results have verified the accuracy of our analytical model, which shed new light on key aspects of the offloading scheme in LTE-WiFi HetNets.