A Cooperative Optimization Method for Mobile User Data Offloading

Abstract

We study the problem of mobile data offloading in a cooperative cellular network where the cellular network can offload a fraction of data traffic to its cooperative WiFi networks. To measure the metric of user satisfaction towards offloading scheme, an S-shaped function is introduced to capture the user utility, namely, the user satisfaction function. Therefore, the first objective is to maximize the user satisfaction. Considering the cooperation and competition among cellular and WiFi networks, the operator has to given up partial benefit to the cooperative partners. Therefore, optimal pricing is the other consideration of this work. The mobile data offloading problem is formulated as a joint optimization of “min-max” problem, which is converted into a bi-level optimization problem, where the upper level is to minimize the operator benefit loss and the lower one is to maximize the user satisfaction. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves the near-optimal solutions with limited iterations.