Energy-Constrained Wi-Fi Offloading Method Using Prefetching

The explosive growth of mobile data traffic causes immense pressure on the limited spectrum of cellular networks (3G/4G) and the deterioration in the quality of wireless communication. Even though mobile network operators deploy WiFi access points (WiFi APs) to offload the traffic from 3G/4G to WiFi, WiFi connectivity is far from ubiquitous. To increase opportunities of offloading, some methods leveraging delay tolerance are proposed. These methods, however, cause a poor performance on delay sensitive applications like Web browsing and streaming of video and audio. To address this problem, we introduce a WiFi offloading method using prefetching. While a user stays in a WiFi area, our method predicts the Web pages that will be requested by the user over 3G/4G after leaving from the WiFi area, and performs prefetching of those pages over WiFi. This allows the user to browse prefetched pages instantly without downloading them over 3G/4G. The simulation results show that our method achieved approximately 11% of offloading of data traffic, suppressing energy consumption within the amount consumed when performing communication only over 3G/4G.