Towards Transitions between Role Assignment Schemes: Enabling Adaptive Offloading in Challenged Networks

The ever increasing number of mobile devices and their heterogeneity requires an efficient utilization of the cellular communication infrastructure. To this end, different offloading approaches have been proposed in the literature. All approaches rely on schemes that assign roles to mobile users, with the respective assignment procedure being realized either centrally or distributed. However, current role assignment schemes are limited to a specific utility function by design (e.g., minimizing the energy consumption), and are unable to adapt to dynamic network conditions and target utilities. This substantially limits the applicability of offloading approaches in dynamic and challenged networks. In this paper, we propose the execution of transitions between role assignment schemes to adapt offloading approaches to challenged networks. We propose and discuss a framework that enables the integration of centralized and decentralized role assignment schemes and the execution of transitions between the respective schemes. Based on an initial evaluation of the coordination aspects of our framework, we identify future research directions and challenges towards the adaptive utilization of offloading schemes in challenged networks.