Prediction-based personalized offloading of cellular traffic through WiFi networks

Mobile data offloading through WiFi is an essential requirement to reduce cellular network traffic. While extensive attempts have been made at mobile data offloading, previous studies have rarely addressed practical issues, such as dealing with diverse user contexts. In this paper, we propose a personalized data offloading scheme to provide maximum throughput within the cellular budget in daily life. We propose an adaptive policy that considers a user's mobility patterns, cellular budget, and network usage for applications. The proposed system employs an adaptive model to predict the throughput of WiFi APs and the network usage of smartphones. Among the three types of predictor model (i.e., spatial, temporal, and spatio-temporal), the system automatically chooses the optimal model for each mobile user without user intervention. The experimental results from 10 mobile users show that the proposed system provides 29% higher throughput than previous systems and minimizes extra data charges.