A cellular-signal-based efficient transmission-scheduling protocol for smartphones

Emerging smartphone-based applications are generating more and more traffic load on smartphones, which makes effective reduction of energy consumption and also monetary cost for data transmissions critical. In this paper, we study how to maximally use free Wi-Fi (when available) for data transmissions, in order to improve the energy use efficiency and also reduce monetary cost of smartphones. Our approach is to first train a person's daily movement route as a list of footprints based on detected the cellular signals on the route and further link these footprints with the availability of free Wi-Fi APs in their vicinity. We further use such footprint-related knowledge to schedule the data transmissions of a smartphone. We accordingly present a cellular-signal-based footprint training method. With the trained footprint list, a cellular signal based efficient smartphone transmission-scheduling protocol (CSET) is proposed, which can schedule the transmissions of a smartphone to access the network in an energy/economical efficient manner by leveraging different levels of delay tolerance of data to transmit. Experiment results demonstrate that CSET can save energy and money efficiently.