skip to main content


Title: D2D Communications Assisted Traffic Offloading in Integrated Cellular-WiFi Networks
Offloading cellular traffic to WiFi networks plays an important role in alleviating the increasing burden on cellular networks. However, excessive traffic offloading brings severe packet collisions into a WiFi network due to its contention-based medium access scheme, which significantly reduces the WiFi network’s throughput. In this paper, we propose DAO, a device-to-device (D2D) communications assisted traffic offloading scheme to improve the amount of traffic offloaded from cellular to WiFi in integrated cellular and WiFi networks. Specifically, in an integrated cellular-WiFi network, the cellular network exploits D2D communications in licensed cellular bands to aggregate traffic from cellular users before offloading it to the WiFi network to reduce the number of contending users in WiFi access. The traffic offloading process in DAO is formulated as an optimization problem that jointly takes into account the activations of aggregation nodes (ANs) and the connections between ANs and offloading users to maximize the offloaded traffic while guaranteeing the long-term data rates required by the offloading users. Extensive simulation results reveal the significant performance gain achieved by DAO over the existing schemes.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1717736 1409797
NSF-PAR ID:
10112934
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
IEEE Internet of Things Journal
ISSN:
2372-2541
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1 to 1
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. WiFi is increasingly used by carriers for opportunistically offloading the cellular network infrastructure or even for increasing their revenue through WiFi-only plans and WiFi ondemand passes. Despite the importance and momentum of this technology, the current deployment of WiFi access points (APs) by the carriers follows mostly a heuristic approach. In addition, the prevalent free-of-charge WiFi access policy may result in significant opportunity costs for the carriers as this traffic could yield non-negligible revenue. In this paper, we study the problem of optimizing the deployment of WiFi APs and pricing the WiFi data usage with the goal of maximizing carrier profit. Addressing this problem is a prerequisite for the efficient integration of WiFi to next-generation carrier networks. Our framework considers various demand models that predict how traffic will change in response to alteration in price and AP locations. We present both optimal and approximate solutions and reveal how key parameters shape the carrier profit. Evaluations on a dataset of WiFi access patterns indicate that WiFi can indeed help carriers reduce their costs while charging users about 50% lower than the cellular service. 
    more » « less
  2. On-demand video accounts for the majority of wireless data traffic. Video distribution schemes based on caching combined with device-to-device (D2D) communications promise order-of-magnitude greater spectral efficiency for video delivery, but hinge on the principle of concentrated demand distributions. This paper presents, for the first time, the analysis and evaluations of the throughput-outage tradeoff of such schemes based on measured cellular demand distributions. In particular, we use a dataset with more than 100 million requests from the BBC iPlayer, a popular video streaming service in the U.K., as the foundation of the analysis and evaluations. We present an achievable scaling law based on the practical popularity distribution, and show that such scaling law is identical to those reported in the literature. We find that also for the numerical evaluations based on a realistic setup, order-of-magnitude improvements can be achieved. Our results indicate that the benefits promised by the caching-based D2D in the literature could be retained for cellular networks in practice. 
    more » « less
  3. On-demand video accounts for the majority of wireless data traffic. Video distribution schemes based on caching combined with device-to-device (D2D) communications promise order-of-magnitude greater spectral efficiency for video delivery, but hinge on the principle of “concentrated demand distributions." This paper presents, for the first time, the analysis and evaluations of the throughput–outage tradeoff of such schemes based on measured cellular demand distributions. In particular, we use a dataset with more than 100 million requests from the BBC iPlayer, a popular video streaming service in the U.K., as the foundation of the analysis and evaluations. We present an achievable scaling law based on the practical popularity distribution, and show that such scaling law is identical to those reported in the literature. We find that also for the numerical evaluations based on a realistic setup, order-of-magnitude improvements can be achieved. Our results indicate that the benefits promised by the caching-based D2D in the literature could be retained for cellular networks in practice. 
    more » « less
  4. Caching of video files on user devices, combined with file exchange through device-to-device (D2D) communications is a promising method for increasing the throughput of wireless networks. Previous theoretical investigations showed that throughput can be increased by orders of magnitude, but assumed a Zipf distribution for modeling the popularity distribution, which was based on observations in wired networks. Thus the question whether cache-aided D2D video distribution can provide in practice the benefits promised by existing theoretical literature remains open. To answer this question, we provide new results specifically for popularity distributions of video requests of mobile users. Based on an extensive real-world dataset, we adopt a generalized distribution, known as Mandelbrot-Zipf (MZipf) distribution. We first show that this popularity distribution can fit the practical data well. Using this distribution, we analyze the throughput–outage tradeoff of the cache-aided D2D network and show that the scaling law is identical to the case of Zipf popularity distribution when the MZipf distribution is sufficiently skewed, implying that the benefits previously promised in the literature could indeed be realized in practice. To support the theory, practical evaluations using numerical experiments are provided, and show that the cache-aided D2D can outperform the conventional unicasting from base stations. 
    more » « less
  5. null (Ed.)
    Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) connected in the form of Internet of Things (IoT) are vulnerable to various security threats, due to the infrastructure-less deployment of IoT devices. Device-to-Device (D2D) authentication of these networks ensures the integrity, authenticity, and confidentiality of information in the deployed area. The literature suggests different approaches to address security issues in CPS technologies. However, they are mostly based on centralized techniques or specific system deployments with higher cost of computation and communication. It is therefore necessary to develop an effective scheme that can resolve the security problems in CPS technologies of IoT devices. In this paper, a lightweight Hash-MAC-DSDV (Hash Media Access Control Destination Sequence Distance Vector) routing scheme is proposed to resolve authentication issues in CPS technologies, connected in the form of IoT networks. For this purpose, a CPS of IoT devices (multi-WSNs) is developed from the local-chain and public chain, respectively. The proposed scheme ensures D2D authentication by the Hash-MAC-DSDV mutual scheme, where the MAC addresses of individual devices are registered in the first phase and advertised in the network in the second phase. The proposed scheme allows legitimate devices to modify their routing table and unicast the one-way hash authentication mechanism to transfer their captured data from source towards the destination. Our evaluation results demonstrate that Hash-MAC-DSDV outweighs the existing schemes in terms of attack detection, energy consumption and communication metrics. 
    more » « less