Seamless Flow Migration on Smartphones without Network Support

Abstract: This paper addresses the following question: Is it possible to migrate TCP/IP flows between different networks on modern mobile devices, without infrastructure support or protocol changes? To answer this question, we make three research contributions. (i) We report a comprehensive characterization of IP traffic on smartphones using traces collected from 27 iPhone 3GS users for three months. (ii) Driven by the findings from the characterization, we devise two novel system mechanisms for mobile devices to sup-port seamless flow migration without network support, and extensively evaluate their effectiveness using our field collected traces of real-life usage. Wait-n-Migrate leverages the fact that most flows are short lived. It establishes new flows on newly available networks but allows pre-existing flows on the old network to terminate naturally, effectively decreasing, or even eliminating, connectivity gaps during network switches. Resumption Agent takes advantage of the functionality integrated into many modern protocols to securely resume flows without application intervention. When combined, Wait-n-Migrate and Resumption Agent provide an unprecedented opportunity to immediately deploy performance and efficiency-enhancing policies that leverage multiple networks to improve the performance, efficiency, and connectivity of mobile devices. (iii) Finally, we report an iPhone 3GS based implementation of these two system mechanisms and show that their overhead is negligible. Furthermore, we employ an example network switching policy, called AutoSwitch, to demonstrate their performance. AutoSwitch improves the Wi-Fi user experience by intelligently migrating TCP flows between Wi-Fi and cellular networks. Through traces and field measurements, we show that AutoSwitch reduces the number of user disruptions by an order of magnitude.