Enabling energy-aware collaborative mobile data offloading for smartphones

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 ofWiFi antennas deployed on existing smartphones and the short contact duration with WiFi APs. Moreover, our study shows 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 experimental evaluation of our prototype on smartphone (Nokia N900) demonstrates that we are able to achieve more than 80% energy saving. Our measurement results also show that MADNet can tolerate minor errors in localization, mobility prediction, and offloading capacity estimation.