Review of mobile data offloading through Wi-Fi

Recently, there has been a tremendous increase in mobile data usage with widespread proliferation of smartphone like devices and increasing popularity of video streaming services such as Youtube. This is already causing overloading of 3G cellular access networks. It is estimated that even the 4G LTE technology which has significantly higher spectral efficiency than 3G will face overloading in near future. As a result, it has become important to find out ways and means of offloading the traffic from the LTE network. One possible solution is offloading the mobile data traffic from the LTE to the Wi-Fi to gain extra capacity and improve overall network performance and per user throughput. In this paper we review the architectural aspect of mobile data offloading from LTE to trusted Wi-Fi access networks. We also review the various offloading strategies that can be used by the operator and performance parameters that can be used to compare offloading in various scenarios.