A traffic QoS aware approach for cellular infrastructure offloading using VANETs

Offloading a part of cellular traffic through other kinds of networks, such as Wi-Fi hotspots and femtoCells represents an interesting solution for operators to cope with the high user traffic demand increase. In this paper, we propose to use the Vehicular ad hoc Networks (VANETs) for the same purpose. We present an analytical study based on an optimization problem formulation to evaluate the potential of VANET to vehicle part of the cellular traffic. The offloading decision considers several constraints related to vehicle-to-infrastructure link availability, channel and medium contention, vehicle-to-vehicle link capacity and quality, data flows volume and the link connectivity duration between the vehicle and the road side unit. Moreover, the originality of this work is the consideration of flow's service class in the offloading decision. Numerical results show that the data offloading fraction is closely affected by the data volume of the flows and by vehicular link quality. Results show also that best effort and background traffics have more priority to be offloaded than the video streaming traffics.