Traffic offloading for 5G: L-LTE or Wi-Fi

To cope with increasing mobile data traffic, researchers are currently working on traffic offloading techniques for delivering data over unlicensed cellular bands. Current offloading schemes based on offloading data to Wi-Fi regardless Wi-Fi has sufficient throughput or not. Though, we propose a novel offloading technique based on the Remaining Throughput Scheme (RTS) for Wi-Fi selection. In our proposed RTS technique, data is offloaded from the Unlicensed Long-Term Evolution (U-LTE) network such as Pico/Femto cells or Programmable Base Stations (PBSs) to Wi-Fi Access Points. Further, we propose Distance-based Transfer (DT) and Speed-based Transfer (ST) schemes to transfer users from PBS to Wi-Fi or Licensed LTE (L-LTE) Base Stations (BSs), where the transfer process relies on distance and speed of users, respectively. In this paper, the following three important issues relating to facilitating this transfer are addressed: which Wi-Fi Access Point (AP) should be selected to transfer users, which U-LTE users should be transferred to Wi-Fi, and which U-LTE users should be transferred to L-LTE. Network performance will increase by using RTS, DT and ST schemes as per the analytical evaluations presented.