On Opportunities for Mobile Offloading

Since the number of Wi-Fi-capable devices existing nowadays has increased drastically in the last few years, traffic offloading between mobile broadband and Wi-Fi has been gaining steady traction. When performed correctly, offloading should provide users with a seamless experience when they use applications on their devices, while optimizing resources to improve user experience. For this reason, in order to analyze the situations when offloading can be performed and how it should best be done, in this paper we perform an in-depth analysis of the behavior of devices with mobile broadband interfaces in various conditions, such as mobility, different times of day, varying types of traffic (audio and video streaming, HTTP). Using this information as input, we propose a device-to-device offloading method and show that using other devices as an offloading tool brings improvements in terms of processing time and server usage.