NAO: A Framework to Enable Efficient Mobile Offloading

Offloading mobile data traffic away from cellular networks has become a main concern for mobile operators to guarantee the quality of service of various applications offered to end-users. Given the explosive growth of smartphone users and mobile data traffic, it is crucial to develop efficient and scalable mechanisms to meet the increasing demand of network capacity. To address the challenge, we propose the Network-Assisted Offloading (NAO), a framework that utilizes network assistance to promote offloading performance and energy saving on mobile hosts. We advocate that an efficient, simple to deploy, and with absolutely minimal or no changes to an end host solution is the key to achieving effective offloading in current and future mobile networks. Compared to solely host-based solutions, our approach explores a new angle to address the offloading challenge through network assistance.