Delay-Aware Predictive Network Selection in Data Offloading

We tackle the network selection problem in operator-initiated mobile data offloading by considering both the predictive and non-predictive cases. For the non-predictive case, we use the Lyapunov optimization technique to design the Delay-aware Network Selection Algorithm (DNSA), which yields an operation cost within O (1/V) bound of the minimum value, for any V > 0. For the predictive case, we propose a novel approach to incorporate prediction into Lyapunov optimization. The proposed Delay-aware Predictive Network Selection Algorithm (DPNSA) efficiently exploits the potential benefit of predicting traffic load and users' mobilities, and avoids the state space explosion issue due to information prediction. Numerical results show that DPNSA with prediction window size 5 offers roughly 30% delay saving over DNSA.