Walking with the oracle: Efficient use of mobile networks through location-awareness

Always Best Packet Switching (ABPS) is a novel approach for wireless communications that enables mobile nodes, equipped with multiple network interface cards (NICs), to dynamically determine the most appropriate NIC to use. Using ABPS, a mobile node can seamlessly switch to a different NIC in order to get better performance, without causing communication interruptions at the application level. To make this possible, NICs are kept always active and a software monitor constantly probes the channels for available access points. While this ensures maximum connection availability, considerable energy may be wasted when no access points are available for a given NIC. In this paper we address this issue by investigating the use of an “oracle” capable of providing information on network availability. This allows to dynamically switch on/off NICs based on reported availability, thus reducing the power consumption. We present a Markov model which allows us to estimate the impact of the oracle on ABPS: results show that significant reduction in energy consumption can be achieved with minimal impact on connection availability. We conclude by describing a prototype implementation of the oracle based on Web services and geolocalization.