WiFi access point deployment for efficient mobile data offloading

Abstract

Recently, there has been a tremendous increase in mobile data usage with the wide-spread proliferation of smartphone like devices. However, this increased demand from users has caused severe traffic overloading in cellular networks. Offloading the traffic through several other devices (femtocells, WiFi access points) have been considered to be immediate remedy for such a problem. Thus, in this paper, we study the deployment of WiFi access points (AP) in a metropolitan area for efficient offloading of mobile data traffic. We analyze a large scale real user mobility traces and propose a deployment algorithm based on the density of user data request frequency. In simulations, we present offloading ratio that our algorithm can accomplish with different number of APs. The results demonstrate that our algorithm can achieve close to optimal offloading ratio that is higher than offloading ratios that existing algorithms can achieve with the same number of APs.