Abstract
Data offloading is a promising low-cost and power-efficient solution for the expected high demands for high-speed connectivity in the near future. We investigate offloading efficiency in a cellular/light fidelity (LiFi) network. This offloading efficiency is a measure of the ratio of traffic carried by the LiFi network to the total traffic carried by both LiFi and cellular networks. We consider the two scenarios of opportunistic and delayed offloading. Effects of user density, user mobility, LiFi-signal blocking, and channel characteristics are investigated. We use Zemax to simulate LiFi channels in the proposed model. Based on our results, delayed offloading can achieve up to 60% offloading efficiency while opportunistic offloading achieves up to 18% offloading efficiency. (C) 2021 Optical Society of America