Managing the decision-making process for opportunistic mobile data offloading

With the increasing number of users subscribing to mobile Internet such as 3G and 4G networks, Wireless Internet Services providers (WISP) aim to provide a good service for customers while elevating the number of clients. Several proposals to offload the traffic of 3G networks were made in the last few years, including the use of femtocells, WiFi offloading and more recently mobile-to-mobile opportunistic offloading. In this paper, we propose a multi-criteria decision-making framework to manage the offload of data from 3G networks using mobile-to-mobile opportunistic communications. Primarily, we focus on building a decision framework that employs only user knowledge to select which users should handover from infrastructure to mobile-to-mobile network, avoiding changes in the infrastructure. Next, we evaluate our proposal and demonstrate its feasibility through trace-driven simulations, achieving 6% of data offload when there is no delay tolerance in the application and up to 36% when application can tolerate 20 minutes of delay.