Partial mobile data offloading with load balancing in heterogeneous cellular networks using Software-Defined Networking

The proliferation of mobile services and the explosive growth of data traffic has created new challenges in cellular networks. Mobile data offloading has attracted significant attention, since it has the ability to alleviate cellular burden by using complementary resources and thus, offers better services to end users. In this paper, we introduce intelligence into heterogeneous network management and propose a Software-Defined Networking based module framework, which includes Wi-Fi based partial data offloading and load balancing. Our objective is to make real time decisions for selectively offloading traffic and balancing loads, while taking network conditions and quality of service (QoS) into consideration. The proposed mechanisms are subject to system-level simulations which shows an improvement in load balancing, in terms of equilibrium extent and network stability. We also prove that with the proposed Wi-Fi partial data offloading algorithm, quality of service can be satisfied, while saving a significant amount of cellular resources through smart resource allocation.