Energy-aware opportunistic mobile data offloading for users in urban environments

Abstract

Abstract-Opportunistic networking (a.k.a. device-to-device communication) is considered a feasible means for offloading mobile data traffic. Since mobile nodes are battery-powered, opportunistic networks must be expected to satisfy the user demand without greatly affecting battery lifetime. To address this requirement, this work introduces progressive selfishness, an adaptive and scalable energy-aware algorithm for opportunistic networks used in the context of mobile data offloading. The paper evaluates the performance of progressive selfishness in terms of both application throughput and energy consumption via extensive trace-driven simulations of realistic pedestrian behavior, and demonstrates that the proposed algorithm is robust against the distributions of node density and initial content availability. The results show that in certain scenarios progressive selfishness achieves up to 85% energy savings during opportunistic downloads while sacrificing less than 1% in application throughput. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that in terms of total energy consumption (by both cellular and opportunistic downloads) in dense environments the performance of progressive selfishness is comparable to downloading contents directly from a mobile network.

A Decade of Research in Opportunistic Networks: Challenges, Relevance, and Future Directions

“…Implementation on smartphones provides a few options in terms of radio technology used (either Bluetooth or WLANOpp; using a pure ad hoc mode may also be possible if paired with additional energy saving schemes [14]). The benefit of integration in the operating system is better control of duty cycling and background operation without interfering with the user.…”

Distance-Based Opportunistic Mobile Data Offloading

“…Mehmeti et al studied the average delay equation for delayed offloading [ 12 ]. Kouyoumdjieva et al studied the relation between the smartphone’s energy and offloading efficiency, and proposed an energy-aware algorithm for opportunistic networks [ 13 ]. In addition, some researchers have begun to study the economics of mobile data offloading [ 14 , 15 ].…”

“…Recently, researchers have being studying how to offload mobile data from cellular networks onto opportunistic networks [ 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 , 15 ]. In opportunistic networks, it is difficult to build a continuous end-to-end routing path, so the networks are disruption tolerant.…”