Is it worth to be patient? Analysis and optimization of delayed mobile data offloading

Operators have recently resorted to WiFi offloading to deal with increasing data demand and induced congestion. Researchers have further suggested the use of “delayed offloading”: if no WiFi connection is available, (some) traffic can be delayed up to a given deadline, or until WiFi becomes available. Nevertheless, there is no clear consensus as to the benefits of delayed offloading, with a couple of recent experimental studies largely diverging in their conclusions. Nor is it clear how these benefits depend on network characteristics (e.g. WiFi availability), user traffic load, etc. In this paper, we propose a queueing analytic model for delayed offloading, and derive the mean delay, offloading efficiency, and other metrics of interest, as a function of the user's “patience”, and key network parameters. We validate the accuracy of our results using a range of realistic scenarios, and use these expressions to show how to optimally choose deadlines.