Cost- and Energy-Aware Multi-Flow Mobile Data Offloading Using Markov Decision Process

• ZHANG Cheng

  Department of Computer Science and Communications Engineering, Waseda University

• GU Bo

  Department of Information and Communications Engineering, Kogakuin University Global Information and Telecommunication Institute, Waseda University

• LIU Zhi

  Global Information and Telecommunication Institute, Waseda University Department of Mathematical and Systems Engineering, Shizuoka University

• YAMORI Kyoko

  Global Information and Telecommunication Institute, Waseda University Department of Management Information, Asahi University

• TANAKA Yoshiaki

  Global Information and Telecommunication Institute, Waseda University Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, Waseda University

Abstract

With the rapid increase in demand for mobile data, mobile network operators are trying to expand wireless network capacity by deploying wireless local area network (LAN) hotspots on which they can offload their mobile traffic. However, these network-centric methods usually do not fulfill the interests of mobile users (MUs). Taking into consideration many issues, MUs should be able to decide whether to offload their traffic to a complementary wireless LAN. Our previous work studied single-flow wireless LAN offloading from a MU’s perspective by considering delay-tolerance of traffic, monetary cost and energy consumption. In this paper, we study the multi-flow mobile data offloading problem from a MU’s perspective in which a MU has multiple applications to download data simultaneously from remote servers, and different applications’ data have different deadlines. We formulate the wireless LAN offloading problem as a finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision process (MDP) and establish an optimal policy by a dynamic programming based algorithm. Since the time complexity of the dynamic programming based offloading algorithm is still high, we propose a low time complexity heuristic offloading algorithm with performance sacrifice. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our proposed offloading algorithms.

Journal

• IEICE Transactions on Communications

  IEICE Transactions on Communications E101.B (3), 657-666, 2018

  The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers

Keywords

• wireless LAN
• multiple-flow
• mobile data offloading
• Markov decision process

Details

• CRID: 1390282679353596928
• NII Article ID: 130006407165
• DOI: 10.1587/transcom.2017nrp0014
• ISSN: 17451345
• ISSN: 09168516
• Web Site: https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/transcom/E101.B/3/E101.B_2017NRP0014/_pdf
• Text Lang: en
• Data Source:
  • JaLC
  • Crossref
  • CiNii Articles
  • KAKEN
• Abstract License Flag: Disallowed