Efficient network selection in heterogeneous communication scenarios using arbitration

Mobile internet has rapidly evolved in the past years with an ever increasing number of novel technologies and services. Today´s mobile devices often support multiple communication technologies for accessing Internet services. However, they all do not tap the full potential of these capabilities as users often have to manually select networks and only one network is used at a time. Different approaches in the area of Always Best Connected propose strategies for user-centric network selection, but most of them focus either on application-oriented or device-centric approaches. The muXer project aims at combining both aspects and increasing the efficiency of network usage. In this paper, we introduce the muXer Global Arbitration Process (GAP) that balances application-oriented ratings of networks while optimizing the usage of communications resources and simultaneously meeting the application and user requirements. Besides deciding which single network an application should use, GAP considers network bundles as well as a proactive delaying of data transfers as additional options to reach a global optimum for all applications running on the device. We compare GAP with other network selection strategies and present benchmarks showing that these aspects bring a clear efficiency gain.