Resource Allocation for Small-Cell-Based Traffic Offloading

Abstract

Traffic offloading through small cells is an efficient approach to address the rapidly growing traffic demand in cellular systems. To facilitate traffic offloading, the recent 3GPP Release 12 has proposed a new paradigm of small-cell dual connectivity (DC) that allows a mobile user (MU) to simultaneously communicate with a macro base station (BS) and a small-cell access point (AP) through two different radio interfaces [1, 2]. With DC, an MU can flexibly schedule its traffic to the BS and offload traffic to small-cell AP simultaneously, hence achieving the benefits, such as reducing mobile data cost and improving radio resource utilization. However, in order to achieve these benefits of traffic offloading, we need to properly design the radio resource allocations due to the MUs’ limited radio resources.