VANET Inherent Capacity for Offloading Wireless Cellular Infrastructure: An Analytical Study

Due to the high user traffic demand increase, offloading cellular traffic through other kinds of networks, such as Wi-Fi hotspots and femtoCells has been highly studied. In this paper, we investigate upon the possibility to use Vehicular ad hoc Networks (VANETs) for the offloading the cellular infrastructure. We present an analytical study based on an optimization problem formulation where the aim is to select a maximum target set of flows that could be routed to the destination downloader node through the VANET network. The offloading decision considers the vehicular link availability, channel load by considering medium contention, vehicle to vehicle link quality and the link connectivity duration between the VANET node and the road side unit. Simulation results of our analytical approach show that the data offloading fraction is closely affected by the data volume of the flows, the channel load and by the link quality. Results show also that the offload of best effort data traffics could reach 100 percent for low data volumes.