The Insights of Mobile Data Offloading: A Comparative Study

For past few years, the cellular companies have experienced exponential growth in subscribers. The unprecedented rise in mobile data traffic puts huge burden on existing cellular networks. To tackle aforementioned issue, various solutions have been proposed in recent years. One of such working solution is mobile data offloading, which refers to the process of offloading cellular network data either to a co-existing cellular network or a third party network. A third party network can be a community network managed by its users, a Wi-Fi mesh network or a licensed band femtocell. Recently, many studies have emerged related to mobile data offloading. Hence, there is a need to have a comparative study of these techniques to understand which technique might be useful for a particular scenario at hand. This paper discusses various data offloading schemes and comprises a detailed study that we conducted on data offloading using Wi-Fi Access Points, Device-to-Device, Wireless Mesh Network, and femtocells techniques. In addition, the paper also discusses other advanced mobile data offloading techniques such as IP Flow Mobility, Core Network, and Delay Tolerant Network.