How beneficial is the WiFi offloading? A detailed game-theoretical analysis in wireless oligopolies

The rapid advances in networking, mobile computing, and virtualization, lead to a dramatic increase in the traffic demand. A cost-effective solution for serving it, while maintaining a good quality of service (QoS), would be to offload a part of the traffic originally targeted for cellular base stations (BSs) to a WiFi infrastructure. Related work on the WiFi offloading often considers markets with a single provider and omits parameters, such as the effect of the offloading on the perceived QoS by users, the capacity of the WiFi infrastructure, and competition of providers. In contrast to these approaches, this paper develops a detailed modeling framework for analysing the WiFi offloading using network economics, game theory, and queueing networks. It also proposes a novel network aggregation technique to reduce the computational complexity of the analysis. Using this framework, the performance of WiFi offloading was evaluated under various scenarios with respect to the bandwidth of BSs and APs, coverage of WiFi, and user preferences. Our results highlight that it is not always profitable for providers to invest in a large WiFi infrastructure. The limited capacity of the WiFi APs restricts the benefits of the offloading.