Energy-Aware Group LBS Using D2D Offloading and M2M-Based Mobile Proxy Handoff Mechanisms Over the Mobile Converged Networks

Since smart phones are always equipped with both cellular and Wi-Fi interfaces, this paper exploits the feasibility of the Wi-Fi-based device-to-device offloading mechanism to reduce cellular traffic. In our group location-based service (LBS) scenario, a group of users travel outdoors together and utilize their smart phones to form a mobile converged network, which is composed of cellular and Wi-Fi networks, to download and share the neighboring LBS data. Due to the wide-range coverage of the cellular network and the keeping-moving characteristic of users, one of these smart phones is selected to play the role of mobile proxy to download the shared LBS data using its cellular interface and then disseminate to other members using multicast over the Wi-Fi network, in which one adaptive FEC mechanism is adopted to tackle the packet loss situation. Besides, a user-transparent machine-to-machine-based mobile proxy handoff mechanism is devised such that each smart phone can play the role of mobile proxy alternately to evenly consume each smart phone's power and thus extend the service time of the group LBS scenario. That is, the proposed offloading mechanism not only offloads the cellular network traffic but also reduces the power consumption.