Augmenting Mobile Data Networks using WiFi Offloading: A Measurement Study

Abstract

The growing popularity and proliferation of mobile devices has resulted in an exponential growth of mobile data traffic or also known as mobile data explosion. Cellular network providers are struggling to address the challenges of bandwidth scarcity and also to meet end user’s expectation of high network capacity. Due to the abundance of existing WiFi infrastructure and significantly inexpensive deployment compared to cellular network upgrade, WiFi offloading seems the most viable solution at the moment. The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) reported in Internet User Survey 2016 that more than half (59.6%) of Internet users in Malaysia used free Wi-Fi to go online. This work presents a real trace of quantitative study on the role of WiFi networks in augmenting mobile data offloading in Malaysia scenario. The research investigated how much traffic load WiFi offloading takes away from cellular network and its utilization pattern according to a different group of users. An extensive measurement study was conducted by collecting statistics of WiFi connectivity from 100 Android platform users for 18 days. Findings from the preliminary results showed that WiFi offloaded a significant amount of data traffic in user’s daily mobile data consumption. Therefore, it is an interesting alternative for cellular network operators in to accommodate and augmenting the current traffic growth as well as providing insights into their network planning or creative price plans.