WiFi enabled Smartphones, Tablets and Mobile Broadband enabled Laptops have led to an increased appetite for mobile data bandwidth hungry applications. Many of today’s devices are dual mode, for example a 3G/LTE handset often has a WiFi chipset onboard. With the amount of cellular traffic being consumed by these Smart devices set to increase further, mobile operators are increasingly turning to WiFi as a complementary technology to work alongside traditional mobile access technologies.

With the rise in number of Carrier-class WiFi networks and the uptake of WiFi by mobile carriers as shown in Figure 1, it becomes extremely important to ensure that end user experience is not degraded when a mobile handset switches between access technologies.

AWTG has carried out a 3G data offloading demonstration under lab conditions to study the results and challenges of seamless offloading, the demonstration was defined based on real life scenarios and used industrial standards as a basis. The network design and topology was based on Cisco and Ericsson solutions.