Experimental analysis of VHO-enabled mobile application for data offloading in heterogeneous wireless networks

Recent years have seen the relentless market explosion of mobile devices, whose ever increasing capabilities (in terms of computational power, networking, and sensing) make them attractive to an endless number of connected applications and services (especially in business and infotainment domains) which can be fully experienced in mobility. This huge market growth naturally involves a constant increase of mobile internet accesses with a consequent overload for mobile operators and potentially a reduced performance for mobile users. In this scenario and during last years, the research field of data offloading and Vertical HandOver (VHO) has gained a significant attention by service providers to start offloading mobile data traffic from 3G/4G networks to WiFi networks. The reduction of the load on cellular network is instrumental to allow the user to be Always Best Connected (ABC) with limited costs. In this paper, we present and analyze the performance of a real VHO-enabled ABC mobile application for Android Platform. The application has been tested in a national trial involving several users all over Italy, commercial (Guglielmo Srl) and private WiFi networks and cellular networks of the main Italian mobile operators for more than a month and 150.000 distinct logs collected during the evaluation.