LTE-WIFI Offloading With Realistic Attributes

In recent years, there has been an enormous increase in data traffic due to the proliferation of smartphones and multi-media applications. Thus, offloading among heterogeneous wireless networks has become a vital incentive for accommodating the huge data traffic increase in cellular networks. In this paper, we propose an algorithm based on Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (TOPSIS) for assessing network selection. Our proposed algorithm accounts for realistic attributes such as users' mobility/velocity and users' battery life. These realistic attributes are proposed in addition to other existing ones such as networks' congestion level, maximum offered throughput, and received signal strength. Such attributes are weighted based on the underlying operational scenario and accordingly available networks are ranked for the best handover selection. Moreover, we assess the merits of network offloading in terms of various realistic KPIs that, to the best of our knowledge, were not considered in this context before including users' equipment power gain, ping-pong and un-useful handovers, and successful number of handovers in addition to other conventional metrics such as achievable throughput and total number of triggered handovers.