Residual size-based mobile data offloading for file transmission on mobile devices

As mobile devices and mobile applications largelygrow, mobile data traffic increases at an unprecedented rate. How to alleviate mobile traffic congestion becomes a widelydiscussed issue. Because that most mobile data is not necessarilyused immediately (e.x. update applications, download a largesize video, etc.), these data are allowed to complete transmissionbefore delay-tolerant deadline. In this paper, we propose residualsize-based mobile data offloading for file transmission on mobiledevices. Our method periodically checks the residual sizeof the file. According to the residual size and delay-tolerantdeadline, our method decides how to use cellular networkand WLAN(Wireless Local Area Network) for file transmission. Besides, we also propose a cost function to investigatetrade-off between deadline and the fraction of the transferredsize using available WLAN. We compare our method withWifflers prediction-based offloading and On-the-spot offloading. The results show that, by the cost function, the trade-off isalways worth in our method compared to Wifflers predictionbasedoffloading and On-the-spot offloading. Our method is morelikely to guarantee file transmission completion before delay-tolerant deadline.