Fueled by its recent success in provisioning on-site wireless Internet access, Wi-Fi is currently perceived as the best positioned technology for pervasive mobile macro network offloading. However, the broad transitions of multiple collocated operators towards this new paradigm may result in fierce competition for the common unlicensed spectrum at hand. In this light, our paper game-theoretically dissects market convergence scenarios by assessing the competition between providers in terms of network performance, capacity constraints, cost reductions, and revenue prospects. We will closely compare the prospects and strategic positioning of fixed line operators offering Wi-Fi services with respect to competing mobile network operators utilizing unlicensed spectrum. Our results highlight important dependencies upon inter-operator collaboration models, and more importantly, upon the ratio between backhaul and Wi-Fi access bit-rates. Furthermore, our investigation of medium-to long-term convergence scenarios indicates that a rethinking of control measures targeting the large-scale monetization of unlicensed spectrum may be required, as otherwise the used free bands may become subject to tragedy-of-commons type of problems.
For the automation of traffic offload, a feasible selection of traffic seems to be required. Siris and Kalyvas @cite_2 have followed up on this idea by offloading delay tolerant traffic based on a designed mobility prediction. Thus, a concentration on nomadic users for mobile traffic offload, e.g., in home scenarios, combined with mass deployment of accessible Wi-Fi hotspots may be of highest interest. In addition, application-awareness seems to be necessary in order to optimally target user requirements, e.g., through Quality of Experience (QoE) trials for applications which have important delay constraints Apple Not Throttling iPhone or iPad Cellular Throughput via Carrier Bundles'': http: www.anandtech.com show 7037 apple-not-throttling-iphones-ipads-cellular-throughput-via-carrier-bundles- , last accessed: June 16, 2013 .
@cite_2
2005108639
Pushing data traffic from cellular to WiFi is an example of inter radio access technology (RAT) offloading. While this clearly alleviates congestion on the over-loaded cellular network, the ultimate potential of such offloading and its effect on overall system performance is not well understood. To address this, we develop a general and tractable model that consists of M different RATs, each deploying up to K different tiers of access points (APs), where each tier differs in transmit power, path loss exponent, deployment density and bandwidth. Each class of APs is modeled as an independent Poisson point process (PPP), with mobile user locations modeled as another independent PPP, all channels further consisting of i.i.d. Rayleigh fading. The distribution of rate over the entire network is then derived for a weighted association strategy, where such weights can be tuned to optimize a particular objective. We show that the optimum fraction of traffic offloaded to maximize SINR coverage is not in general the same as the one that maximizes rate coverage, defined as the fraction of users achieving a given rate.