Enabling energy-aware mobile data offloading for smartphones through vertical collaboration

Searching for mobile data offloading solutions has become topical in recent years. In the Metropolitan Advanced Delivery Network (MADNet) project, we explore the potential of multiple interfaces on smartphones through a collaborative design to enable energy-aware WiFi-based mobile data offloading. We advocate that the vertical collaboration across different wireless access technologies and network vendors is the key to aggregate the power of mobile operators, WiFi service providers, and end-users. Aiming at reducing the energy consumption on smartphones, we propose an energy-aware algorithm supported by our collaborative architecture to avoid offloading to low-throughput WiFi networks which may consume more energy. The evaluation of streaming applications on our prototyped Nokia N900 smartphones demonstrates that we are able to achieve more than 80% energy saving. Our experiment in the wild also shows that our design can tolerate the minor errors of localization, mobility prediction, and offload capacity estimation.