Cost- and energy-aware multi-flow mobile data offloading under time dependent pricing

Nowadays, mobile network operators (MNOs) are trying to deploy wireless local area network (LAN) to offload mobile data from their cellular networks to complementary wireless LAN for congestion relief and cost savings. However, these network-centric methods do not take into consideration mobile user's (MU's) interests of monetary cost, energy consumption, and applications' deadlines. How the MU decides whether to offload their traffic to a complementary wireless LAN is non-trivial and important issue. Previous studies assume that MNO adopts usage-based pricing for mobile data, which only cares about how much a MU consumes data but not when a MU consumes data. In this paper, we study the MU's policy to minimize his monetary cost and energy consumption under time-dependent pricing (TDP). We formulate MU's wireless LAN offloading problem as a finite-horizon discrete-time Markov decision process (MDP) and establish an optimal policy by a dynamic programming based algorithm. Extensive simulations are conducted to validate our proposed offloading algorithm.