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A comprehensive survey on mobile data offloading in heterogeneous network

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Abstract

With the explosive increase of smartphones, tablets and laptops, the past few years have witnessed the exponential rise of mobile data traffic. This has already caused data overload on cellular networks. As a result, cellular networks can not offer sufficient capacity to accommodate the numerous mobile data requirements. Therefore, it is an urgent agenda for cellular network operators to find out immediate solutions. As a promising way to tackle this problem, mobile data offloading is considered to transfer traffic which originally generates towards cellular network to complementary networks. This article aims to present a comprehensive overview of mobile data offloading. According to the participation of infrastructure, we classify the existing strategies into two major categories, namely infrastructure-based strategies and infrastructure-less strategies. Then, we review the technical aspects and discuss the state of the art in each category. After discussing advantages and disadvantages of these strategies, we also introduce the performance metrics used in offloading system, as well as the future challenges.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation (61102105), the National Research Foundation for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20102304120014), the Natural Science Foundation of Heilongjiang Province of China (F201029), and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (HEUCF1408).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Information and Communication Engineering, Harbin Engineering University, Harbin, 150001, China

    Tong Wang, Pengcheng Li, Xibo Wang & Yunfeng Wang

  2. Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, London, UK

    Tianhao Guo

  3. Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

    Yue Cao

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  1. Tong Wang
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  2. Pengcheng Li
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Correspondence to Yue Cao.

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Wang, T., Li, P., Wang, X. et al. A comprehensive survey on mobile data offloading in heterogeneous network. Wireless Netw 25, 573–584 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-017-1576-0

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