Designing and Analysis of A Wi-Fi Data Offloading Strategy Catering for the Preference of Mobile Users

TL;DR

This paper proposes a preference-oriented Wi-Fi offloading strategy modeled as a Markov modulated queueing system, optimizing user utility by balancing cost and delay based on individual preferences.

Contribution

It introduces a novel offloading strategy tailored to user preferences, modeled with a three-state Markov modulated queueing system, and provides a method to determine the optimal deadline for maximizing utility.

Findings

Optimal deadline exists for maximizing user utility.

The strategy achieves good performance in simulations.

The model effectively balances cost and delay based on user preferences.

Abstract

In recent years, offloading mobile traffic through Wi-Fi has emerged as a potential solution to lower down the communication cost for mobile users. Users hope to reduce the cost while keeping the delay in an acceptable range through Wi-Fi offloading. Also, different users have different sensitivities to the cost and the delay performance. How to make a proper cost-delay tradeoff according to the user's preference is the key issue in the design of the offloading strategy. To address this issue, we propose a preference-oriented offloading strategy for current commercial terminals, which transmit traffic only via one channel simultaneously. We model the strategy as a three-state M/MMSP/1 queueing system, of which the service process is a Markov modulated service process (MMSP), and obtain the structured solutions by establishing a hybrid embedded Markov chain. Our analysis shows that, given the user's preference, there exists an optimal deadline to maximize the utility, which is defined as the linear combination of the cost and the delay. We also provide a method to select the optimal deadline. Our simulation demonstrates that this strategy with the optimal deadline can achieve a good performance.