The Effect of Mobility on Delayed Data Offloading

Abstract: Delayed offloading is a widely accepted solution for mobile users to offload their traffic through Wi-Fi when they are moving in urban areas. However, delayed offloading enhances offloading efficiency at the expense of delay performance. Previous works mainly focus on the improvement of offloading efficiency while keeping delay performance in an acceptable region. In this paper, we study the impact of the user mobility on delayed data offloading in respect to the tradeoff between offloading efficiency and delay performance. We model a mobile terminal with delayed data offloading as an M/MMSP/1 queuing system with three service states. To be practical, we consider the feature of currently commercial mobile terminals in our analysis. Our analytical result shows that the mobility of the users can reduce the queueing delay incurred by the delayed offloading, and suggests that delayed offloading strategies can be optimized according to the mobility of the terminals once the delay requirement is given.