A traffic burstiness-based offload scheme for energy efficiency deliveries in heterogeneous wireless networks

Latest mobile multimedia applications have important impact on smartphone usage in terms of both energy consumption and Quality of Service (QoS) levels. This impact is dependent on the level of burstiness of the multimedia traffic. This paper proposes eMTCP-BT, a novel energy-efficiency-oriented offloading scheme for multipath TCP (MPTCP) deliveries which considers traffic burstiness level in its decision making process. Mobile applications traffic is categorized according to its burstiness level, including some most widely-used services such as Voice over IP (VoIP) service, video streaming, large file downloading and web browsing. eMTCP-BT increases the energy efficiency of the multipath TCP content deliveries by performing an innovative distribution of the overall traffic for its delivery via the available wireless network interfaces (and paths) based on the traffic burstiness level. Real traffic trace-based simulation experiments have been conducted involving a mobile device receiving traffic over the Long Term Evolution (LTE) and IEEE 802.11 interfaces. Result analysis demonstrates how eMTCP-BT outperforms both eMTCP and the original MPTCP in terms of energy efficiency by up to 91.68%.