Urban-scale Cellular Offloading through Wi-Fi Access Points: a Measurement-based Case Study

Patrice Raveneau (1) , Razvan Stanica (1) , Marco Fiore (1, 2) , Sandesh Uppoor (3, 4) , Mathieu Cunche (5, 6) , Hervé Rivano (1) , Zbigniew Smoreda (3)

1 URBANET - Réseaux capillaires urbains
2 CNR-IEIIT
3 Orange Labs [Issy les Moulineaux]
4 UPMC - Université Pierre et Marie Curie - Paris 6
5 PRIVATICS - Privacy Models, Architectures and Tools for the Information Society
6 CITI - CITI Centre of Innovation in Telecommunications and Integration of services

Wi-Fi offloading is one of the most effective approaches to relieve the cellular radio access from part of the burgeoning mobile demand. To date, Wi-Fi offloading has been mainly leveraged in limited contexts, such as home, office or campus environments. In this paper, we investigate the scaling properties of Wi-Fi offloading, by studying how it would perform on a much larger scope than those considered today. To that end, we consider a real-world citywide scenario, built on data about actual infrastructure deployments and mobile traffic demand, and observe which amount of traffic could be accommodated by the existing pervasive Wi-Fi access infrastructure, were it opened to mobile users. We find that more than 80% of the mobile traffic demand in a large urban area may be easily served by Wi-Fi access points, under a wide range of system settings.

Mots clés: measurement data; open Wi-Fi; mobile demand; Cellular offloading

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Patrice Raveneau, Razvan Stanica, Marco Fiore, Sandesh Uppoor, Mathieu Cunche, et al.. Urban-scale Cellular Offloading through Wi-Fi Access Points: a Measurement-based Case Study. RTSI 2015 - 1st International Forum on Research and Technologies for Society and Industry, Sep 2015, Turin, Italy. ⟨hal-01201719⟩