Lightweight Opportunistic Mobile Data Offloading

2. Related Work

Mobile data offloading is the use of complementary network communication technologies to deliver mobile data traffic originally planned for transmission over cellular networks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_data_offloading). Complementary network communication technologies include integrated mobile broadcast, Wi-Fi and femto cell (Cisco Communities, n.d.). The amount of data which should be carried out on the cellular bands can be reduced by offloading scheme and also freeing bandwidth for other users. Researchers proposed several solutions for mobile traffic offloading as discussed below:

Wiffler can be used to augment 3G capabilities in cellular environments. In Wiffler, the data chosen for offloading from cellular to Wi-Fi network is based on historical data collected from Wi-Fi access points. In some cases the data so collected may give inappropriate and misleading information for future offloading decision (Balasubramanian et al., 2010).

MultiNets is a mobile offloading system supporting seamless switch-over between wireless interfaces on mobile devices in real time. It makes unfair decision by estimating bandwidth and signal strength of access points for future offloading. In MultiNets, any extra network infrastructure support is not required to run the existing application smoothly (Nirjon et al., 2014).

The MADNet architecture is built around the concept of using cellular networks to do signaling and a combination of cellular networks and other communication opportunities to deliver the data. It also uses location services (e.g., GPS, cellular tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi beacon footprints) to help users choose the location of delivery (Dimatteo et al., 2011).