User instruction mechanism for temporal traffic smoothing in mobile networks

Abstract With the recent spread of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, the proportion of mobile device traffic as part of the total Internet traffic has been continuously increasing. Particularly, when a lot of mobile device traffic is concentrated in a wireless access network at a specific time, user throughputs drastically decrease, which results in the deterioration of communication quality. To solve this problem, temporal traffic offloading, which smooths traffic by moving peak traffic to off-peak time, has been proposed. However, since the conventional approaches were designed from the viewpoint of the operator, user satisfaction might not be improved even if traffic is smoothed. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a new mechanism that instructs users to delay their traffic to move part of the peak-time traffic to off-peak time to smooth traffic temporally. Our mechanism allows the user to decide whether to follow the instruction without forcing her or him to delay their requests so that her or his satisfaction is ensured. Our simulation study using a real traffic measurement dataset validates our mechanism in terms of traffic smoothing and user satisfaction.