The continuous increase of mobile data demand has led to mobile data offloading as a solution for the network congestion problem. The majority of the state-of-the-art is focused on the downlink offloading, while the change of mobile user habits, like mobile content creation and uploading, makes uplink offloading a rising issue. In this work we focus on the uplink offloading using Ip Flow Mobility (IFOM). IFOM allows a LTE mobile User Equipment (UE) to maintain two concurrent data streams, one through LTE and the other through WiFi access technology, that presents uplink limitations due to the inherent fairness design of IEEE 802.11 DCF. In this paper, we propose a weighted Proportionally Fair Bandwidth (PFB) allocation algorithm, for the WiFi access, in conjunction with a pricing-based rate allocation for the LTE uplink, aiming to improve the energy efficiency of the UEs that operate under the concurrent use of access technologies that IFOM provides. We present a theoretical analysis of the proposed schemes and evaluate their performance in terms of energy efficiency through simulations.

Peer Reviewed