Application Requirements for Mobile Offloading

Offloading is a concept to enhance the capacity and service of cellular networks by adding easy-to-deploy small cells, e.g., below roof-tops, with limited coverage to anytime/anywhere access deployments. Typically, such offloading setups are dedicated to stationary usage in street cafés, offices, shopping malls, and at home. The supported usage mode is the so-called "sit-through" usage mode, which has almost the same requirements to applications and operating systems as stationary (wired) Internet connections. Other approaches, e.g., as studied in {Car-to-X} projects, show promising additional communication concepts that make use of the "walk-through" and "drive-through" communication modes. The advantage of also supporting these usage modes is that these will additionally contribute to the offloading effect. In this article, we have set our focus to these mobile usage modes. We study the achievable service from a user and from a network perspective and quantify them for a modeling using random mobility models. For the user's view, we have a closer look to the fluctuations of the obtained service rates, which we identify as a problem for standard application models, especially for interactive applications. Based on these findings, we derive requirements for applications that suit such highly variable environments. We find similarities with applications from delay tolerant networking and from application models supporting a disconnected operations mode.