Offloading mobile data traffic for QoS-aware service provision in vehicular cyber-physical systems

• A Wi-Fi and VANET offloading model is established and the offloading capacity is quantified.
• A multi-objective combinatorial problem for mobile data traffic offloading is formulated and optimized.
• The proposed offloading approach of Vehicular Cyber-Physical Systems (VCPSs) supports global QoS guarantee and service provisioning.

Owing to the increasing number of vehicles in vehicular cyber-physical systems (VCPSs) and the growing popularity of various services or applications for vehicles, cellular networks are being severely overloaded. Offloading mobile data traffic through Wi-Fi or a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) is a promising solution for partially solving this problem because it involves almost no monetary cost. We propose combination optimization to facilitate mobile data traffic offloading in emerging VCPSs to reduce the amount of mobile data traffic for the QoS-aware service provision. We investigate mobile data traffic offloading models for Wi-Fi and VANET. In particular, we model mobile data traffic offloading as a multi-objective optimization problem for the simultaneous minimization of mobile data traffic and QoS-aware service provision; we use mixed-integer programming to obtain the optimal solutions with the global QoS guarantee. Our simulation results confirm that our scheme can offload mobile data traffic by up to 84.3% while satisfying the global QoS guarantee by more than 70% for cellular networks in VCPSs.