Traffic classification based mobile communication network traffic offload mechanism

Mobile traffic presents exponential growth during the past few years and hence has brought unprecedented impact on the mobile operators' existing core networks. In order to maintain sufficient mobile communication network capacity for value added services, 3GPP has recently introduced an architecture called "LIPA/SIPTO" (Local IP Access/Selected IP Traffic Offload) to offload selected mobile IP traffic from the core network. But there is no specific definition on how to select the traffic that should be offloaded. On base of LIPA/SIPTO architecture, a traffic offload mechanism based on on-line traffic classification was proposed, including maximum entropy based IP-traffic classification scheme (METCS) and dynamic traffic offload algorithm. Simulation results show that METCS outperforms existing methods by offering average 5%-8% improvement in classification accuracy with about 60% time. The traffic offload mechanism can reduce about 60% traffic from core network while selects the best offload path according to the type of traffic to be offloaded.