Engineering Link Utilization in Cellular Offloading Oriented VANETs

At present, single network and technology could be impotent when facing: 1) the rocketing proliferation of mobile devices; and 2) the heterogeneity of data services and users´ contexts. Therefore, offloading some specific traffic to other networks is a natural yet effective solution. To this end, this paper engineers the cellular offloading oriented vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs), which concentrate on offloading users´ bandwidth-hungry traffic in vehicular environment. Specifically, a two-phase resource allocation process is adopted, where utilization patterns of both wireless and backhaul links are studied for the sake of resource exploitation efficiency, with considerations on practical issues including link quality variety, fairness and caching. The former is formulated as an integer linear programming (ILP) problem aiming at system throughput maximization, and a heuristic algorithm is developed as solution due to the problem´s NP-hardness nature. The latter´s objective is identified and a simple implementation algorithm is designed correspondingly. Extensive simulations are conducted and the results show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.