10th IEEE International Conference on Sensing, Communication, and Networking
IEEE SECON, New Orleans, USA, 2013
Acceptance Rate: 18.2%

Enabling Energy-Aware Collaborative Mobile Data Offloading for Smartphones

Aaron Yi Ding - University of Helsinki / HIIT
Bo Han - AT&T Labs / University of Maryland, College Park
Yu Xiao - Aalto University / Carnegie Mellon University
Pan Hui - Deutsche Telekom Labs / HKUST
Aravind Srinivasan - University of Maryland, College Park
Markku Kojo - University of Helsinki
Sasu Tarkoma - University of Helsinki / HIIT

Abstract:
Searching for mobile data offloading solutions has been topical 
in recent years. In this paper, we present a collaborative 
WiFi-based mobile data offloading architecture - Metropolitan 
Advanced Delivery Network (MADNet), targeting at improving the 
energy efficiency for smartphones. According to our measurements, 
WiFi-based mobile data offloading for moving smartphones is 
challenging due to the limitation of WiFi antennas deployed on 
existing devices and the short contact duration with WiFi APs. 
Moreover, our studies show that the number of open-accessible 
WiFi APs is very limited for smartphones in metropolitan areas, 
which significantly affects the offloading opportunities for 
previous schemes that use only open APs. To address these 
problems, MADNet intelligently aggregates the collaborative 
power of cellular operators, WiFi service providers and end-users. 
We design an energy-aware algorithm for energy-constrained devices 
to assist the offloading decision. Our design enables smartphones 
to select the most energy efficient WiFi AP for offloading. The 
evaluation on our prototype smartphone (Nokia N900) demonstrates 
that we are able to achieve more than 80% energy saving. Our 
experiments in the wild also show that MADNet can tolerate minor 
errors of localization, mobility prediction, and offloading 
capacity estimation.

Coding Team:

Aaron Yi Ding - University of Helsinki, FI
Bo Han - AT&T Research, USA


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