Cost-Effective Multi-Mode Offloading with peer-assisted communications

Keywords: Mobile data offloading WiFi Opportunistic networks Delay tolerant networks Mobility Peer-assisted communications a b s t r a c t Data offloading through WiFi networks has been identified as a promising solution to cellular network congestion caused by the ongoing explosive growth in mobile data traffic. In this paper, we propose Cost-Effective Multi-Mode Offloading (CEMMO) that enhances off-loading with multi-hop peer-assisted communications regardless of content and popularity. CEMMO enables three modes of communication: cellular delivery, delay-tolerant offloading, and peer-assisted offloading. Exploiting user knowledge on mobility and WiFi connectivity, CEMMO assists the cellular operator in selecting the best out of its three modes in order to reduce the overall cost in terms of financial settlement, energy consumption , and user satisfaction. Our simulations with a realistic mobility and connectivity prediction model based on a Markov process show that CEMMO offloads up to 59% of the mobile data traffic and reduces transfer cost per MB up to 16% over delay-tolerant offload-ing. This paper also discusses practical issues in CEMMO adoption. Due to the recent proliferation of smartphones and tablets , mobile data traffic has been explosively growing and pushing the capacity limits of cellular networks In particular , smartphones equipped with high-resolution cameras are sold globally at astounding rates, and content generated by mobile users significantly rises fueled by popular social networking and cloud storage applications such as Facebook, and Dropbox. With the global mobile data traffic forecasted to increase 13 times within the next 5 years [1], cellular network providers need to find cost-effective ways to handle the growing traffic demands with expected Quality of Service (QoS) levels. Infrastructure upgrade is the intuitive solution to deal with the congestion problem; however, it is insufficient as a financially sustainable solution. Offloading mobile data through WiFi networks is the most promising solution to tackle the congestion problem because the cost of WiFi access points (APs) required for the offloading is relatively low, WiFi technology uses unlicensed bands and offloading can satisfactorily serve delay-tolerant types of data traffic. So far, research efforts have been focused on either on-the-spot offloading (OTSO) [2], where data is offloaded only over an immediately available WiFi connection, or delay-tolerant offloading (DTO) [3], where the transmission is delayed for some time in case the user encounters an offloading opportunity later. Both offloading types offer significant benefits, mainly in environments with stable WiFi coverage. In this paper, we target dense …