TOMP: Opportunistic traffic offloading using movement predictions

Abstract

Recent forecasts predict that the amount of cellular data traffic will significantly increase within the next few years. The reason for this trend is on the one hand the high growth rate of mobile Internet users and on the other hand the growing popularity of high bandwidth streaming applications. Given the fact that cellular networks (e.g. UMTS) have only limited capacity, the existing network infrastructure will soon reach its limits. As a result, the concept of traffic offloading attracts more and more attention in research since it aims at the reduction of cellular traffic by shifting it to local-area networks like Wi-Fi. One particular form of traffic offloading is known as opportunistic traffic offloading and follows the basic idea to shift traffic from the cellular network to the level of inter-device communication of mobile devices. To perform opportunistic traffic offloading in an efficient way, assumptions about the prospective inter-device connectivity of the mobile devices have to be made. In general, the more inter-device connections are possible the more traffic can be offloaded. To utilize this fact, we developed the TOMP system. TOMP is the first opportunistic traffic offloading system that uses movement predictions of mobile users to analyze the prospective inter-device connectivity. In this paper we propose three different metrics for analyzing movement predictions and present an algorithm, which uses these metrics to utilize an efficient opportunistic traffic offloading. To evaluate TOMP, we show by simulation that we can save up to 40% of cellular messages in comparison to a typical cellular network.

Traffic Offloading through Wi-Fi Networks

“…They basically proposed how to select initial target set client based on community based selection and in these communities select the initial source. Baier et al [21]propose three particular estimations for separating advancement desires and present a computation, which uses these estimations to utilize a capable spearheading development offloading. They used approach of subset decision issue by envisioning the improvement of endcustomers with a particular true objective to gage future between contraption accessibility.…”

Vehicular Networks

“…However, it requires the user's mobility behavior, which may not be easy to obtain. Similarly, TOMP [Baier et al 2012] is a cellular opportunistic offloading strategy that selects some mobile devices as the initial target set. This set of mobile devices is then responsible for opportunistically disseminating the information to its peers.…”

Characterization and applications of temporal random walks on opportunistic networks

“…The introduction of a new mobile infrastructure is needed to resolve these problems. We can refer to some work that has already explored the network offloading using mobile nodes, such as in [8,9,10]…”