Efficient Transmission of Smartphone Application Traffic in Wireless Access Networks

Smartphones together with the respective applications (apps) and services have become an integral part of our daily life. The feature set of smartphones, such as sensors, cameras, processing speed, memory, etc. is constantly increasing and apps exploit these features to offer even more intelligent services for the customers. However, there is only less inter-working between the network and mobile devices as well as the apps. They are considering the wireless access as a bit-pipe without taking into account the characteristics of each wireless technology. This leads to an inefficient use of wireless resources. In this paper we present the concept and the implementation of a context-and policy based interface and traffic management approach which aims to tackle this problem. This approach exploits the feature set of the smartphone as well as the context information available on the smartphone to improve the overall resource usage. Intelligent interface and traffic management mechanisms are envisioned on the device in order to improve the network efficiency as well as the battery runtime on smartphones without affecting the delivered application service quality at the same time.