SmartTransfer: transferring your mobile multimedia contents at the "right" time

Today's mobile Internet is heavily overloaded by the increasing demand and capability of mobile devices, in particular, multimedia traffic. However, not all traffic is created equal, and a large portion of multimedia contents on the mobile Internet is delay tolerant. We study the problem of capitalizing the content transfer opportunities under better network conditions via postponing the transfers without violating the user-specified deadlines. We propose a new framework called SmartTransfer, which offers a unified content transfer interface to mobile applications. We also develop two scheduling algorithms to opportunistically schedule the content transfers. Via extensive trace-driven simulations, we show that our algorithms outperform a baseline scheduling algorithm by far: up to 17 times improvement in upload throughput and/or at most 20 dBm boost in signal strength. The simulation results also reveal various tradeoff between the two proposed scheduling algorithms. We have implemented our framework and one of the scheduling algorithms on Android, to demonstrate their practicality and efficiency.