New Mobility-Aware Application Offloading Design with Low Delay and Energy Efficiency

In this paper, we present a new design, named MWS, for application offloading in mobile environments. MWS implements a mobility-aware WiFi selection policy on smartphones with the goal of achieving low delay and energy efficiency. The essence of this work lies in the emphasis of minimizing the number of occurrences of WiFi disconnects by utilizing human mobility habits and cloud-assisted WiFi information profiling. The WiFi access points (AP) selected by MWS are predicted to maintain the longest connection with smartphones among all available APs. As a result, MWS manages to avoid unnecessary or unsuccessful handoff that may otherwise be caused by the default signal strength oriented WiFi selection policy. The benefits brought by MWS are validated in our real-world evaluation. Compared with the default policy, MWS effectively reduces the number of occurrences of WiFi disconnects, and achieves a reduction of up to 50% in energy consumption and up to 66% in data communication time for application offloading in mobile environments.