Optimizing profit and performance for multi-homed mobile hotspots

Broadband Internet access in mobile hotspots (e.g. public transport vehicles) through high-speed on-board local area networks and mobile routers is becoming an increasingly popular area of research and development. Mobile hotspot operators can provide faster, cheaper, and more stable communication services to on-board passengers using the multi-homing technique; whereby the mobile router is connected to a diverse array of wireless access technologies (e.g., GPRS, UMTS, 802.11) through a multiplicity of wireless service providers. As the set of available access networks may change frequently during each trip, the challenge for the mobile hotspot operators is to decide on how to "best" distribute the user data traffic among the multiple access networks. In this paper, we proposed a new business model and a user traffic distribution algorithm that aims to maximize the profit for the mobile hotspot operator while providing an acceptable level of service. We also provide results from a detailed simulation study of this algorithm under various usage probability distributions.