Summary
Asia-Pacific Network Operations and Management Symposium
2016
Session Number:TS3
Session:
Number:TS3-3
A Reinforcement Learning Approach for Cost- and Energy-Aware Mobile Data Offloading
Cheng Zhang, Bo Gu, Zhi Liu, Kyoko Yamori, Yoshiaki Tanaka,
pp.-
Publication Date:2016/10/5
Online ISSN:2188-5079
Summary:
With rapid increases in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying WiFi hotspots to offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill interests of mobile users (MUs). MUs consider many problems to decide whether to offload their traffic to a complementary WiFi network. In this paper, we study the WiFi offloading problem from MU's perspective by considering delay-tolerance of traffic, monetary cost, energy consumption as well as the availability of MU's mobility pattern. We first formulate the WiFi offloading problem as a finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision process (FDTMDP) with known MU's mobility pattern and propose a dynamic programming based offloading algorithm. Since MU's mobility pattern may not be known in advance, we then propose a reinforcement learning based offloading algorithm, which can work well with unknown MU's mobility pattern. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our proposed offloading algorithms.