Performance and Energy Efficiency of Mobile Data Offloading with Mobility Prediction and Prefetching

Abstract: We present a detailed evaluation of procedures that exploit mobility prediction and prefetching to enhance offloading of traffic from mobile networks to WiFi hotspots, for both delay tolerant and delay sensitive traffic. We consider empirical measurements and evaluate the percentage of offloaded traffic, data transfer delay, and energy consumption of the proposed procedures. Our results illustrate how various factors such as mobile, WiFi and hotspot backhaul throughput, data size, number of hotspots, along with time and throughput estimation errors, influence the performance and energy efficiency of mobile data offloading enhanced with mobility prediction and prefetching.