As the world is entering the era of 5G, we are witnessing exponential growth in the volume of data traffic generated and consumed by mobile devices. Mobile data offloading handles the surge in mobile data traffic by offloading part of the traffic onto the Wi-Fi network. In this context, we design and analyse a quality of service (QoS) enhancement scheme for delayed mobile data offloading. We first consider prioritised queuing of traffic as a scheme for QoS provisioning. Using the concepts of

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... tual waiting time, renewal process, and level crossing arguments, we derive the average transmission delay of the offloaded and reneged packets of high priority. Next, we mathematically validate the benefit of balking all such packets whose expected virtual waiting time exceeds their deadline. Using a three-dimensional Markov chain model, we derive the required balking probability. Moreover, we merge the technique of balking with prioritisation for improving QoS in delayed offloading. Through an extensive simulation, we validate our analysis and demonstrate how the proposed scheme reduces the transmission delay without sacrificing offloading efficiency. Our investigation has the potential to be adopted in future mobile data offloading standards for improving QoS. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.