Offloading in Heterogeneous Wireless Access Environments: The Mobile Case

Typical offloading setups in cellular communications are meant for stationary usage in special places, such as in cafes, in offices, and at home. Beyond that mobile usage modes in environments without continuous coverage are known, e.g., from research in the field of car-to-infrastructure communications (C2I) and from delay- and disruption-tolerant networking (DTN). It is a well established vision to employ these mobile usage modes from special environments also for opportunistic communication concepts in heterogeneous cellular access environments to cope with the vastly different service rates in coverage cells and capacity cells. It is our interest to study these rate fluctuations between different cell types. Our contribution is threefold: i) we introduce a simple and tractable reference setup as benchmark for studies, ii) we describe and exercise three approaches to calculate the service that mobile users will see in this setup, and iii) we derive a problem statement for control concepts for opportunistic message communications under vastly fluctuating service conditions. It is a remarkable side-result of our calculations that the population in access cells has a similar distribution when being calculated using a spatial Poisson process and when being simulated with a random mobility setup.