Poster: SoftOffload: A Programmable Approach Toward Collaborative Mobile Traffic Offloading

The fast increase of mobile traffic from smartphone-like devices has created a huge pressure for the cellular operators to manage the network infrastructure and resources. Offloading the mobile traffic to alternative networks such as WiFi is sought as a promising direction to solve this problem cost-effectively. According to our study and experimental findings [1], existing research proposals are lack of concern for the complexity of network deployment and device limitations, which impedes the solution deployment. To overcome such challenge, we propose SoftOffload, a programmable framework for collaborative mobile traffic of-floading. SoftOffload takes the advantage of software defined networking (SDN) paradigm in terms of openness and extensibility. We have implemented the first prototype utilising the open source Floodlight platform [2].