With the rapid increase in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying wireless local area network (LAN) hotspots on to which they can offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill the interests of mobile users (MUs). Taking into consideration many issues such as different applications' deadlines, monetary cost and energy consumption, how the MU decides whether to offload their traffic to a complementary wireless LAN is an important issue. Previous studies assume the MU's mobility pattern is known in advance, which is not always true. In this paper, we study the MU's policy to minimize his monetary cost and energy consumption without known MU mobility pattern. We propose to use a kind of reinforcement learning technique called deep Q-network (DQN) for MU to learn the optimal offloading policy from past experiences. In the proposed DQN based offloading algorithm, MU's mobility pattern is no longer needed. Furthermore, MU's state of remaining data is directly fed into the convolution neural network in DQN without discretization. Therefore, not only does the discretization error present in previous work disappear, but also it makes the proposed algorithm has the ability to generalize the past experiences, which is especially effective when the number of states is large. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our proposed offloading algorithms.

With the rapid increase in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying wireless local area network (LAN) hotspots on which they can offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill the interests of mobile users (MUs). Taking into consideration many issues, MUs should be able to decide whether to offload their traffic to a complementary wireless LAN. Our previous work studied single-flow wireless LAN offloading from a MU's perspective by considering delay-tolerance of traffic, monetary cost and energy consumption. In this paper, we study the multi-flow mobile data offloading problem from a MU's perspective in which a MU has multiple applications to download data simultaneously from remote servers, and different applications' data have different deadlines. We formulate the wireless LAN offloading problem as a finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision process (MDP) and establish an optimal policy by a dynamic programming based algorithm. Since the time complexity of the dynamic programming based offloading algorithm is still high, we propose a low time complexity heuristic offloading algorithm with performance sacrifice. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our proposed offloading algorithms.