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An Era of Mobile Data Offloading Opportunities: A Comprehensive Survey

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Abstract

In the present trend of having an explosive use of smartphones and IoT-based devices, there is an exponential growth in mobile data. It has already caused an overburden of mobile data traffic across the network service providers. The cellular networks face an enormous challenge in predicting the need of upcoming technologies specifically the mobile data offloading solutions. Their limitations to evolve all of a sudden restrict the network administrators and collaborators to offer a compromised but promising solution to cater the mobile data requirements. In this paper, we study the evolutionary trend in data offloading solutions since its evolution. We classify the available literature into different types of offloading solutions on the basis of their major contributions, i.e., data offloading delay permissions, decision makers in offloading solutions, types of networks used for offloading and the major infrastructure requirements for offering offloading. Besides, we present the timeline analysis of the mobile data offloading strategies by discussing their pros and cons for their application in real network scenarios. Towards the end, we highlight the major research issues and challenges to showcase the upcoming need of feasible contribution of research community.

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Sharma, P., Nisha, Shukla, S. et al. An Era of Mobile Data Offloading Opportunities: A Comprehensive Survey. Mobile Netw Appl 29, 13–28 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11036-023-02116-8

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