Seamless Flow Migration on Smartphones without Network Support

This paper addresses the following question: Is it possible to migrate TCP/IP flows between different networks on modern mobile devices, without infrastructure support or protocol changes? To answer this question, we make three research contributions. (i) We report a comprehensive characterization of IP traffic on smartphones using traces collected from 27 iPhone 3GS users for three months. (ii) Driven by the findings from the characterization, we devise two novel system mechanisms for mobile devices to support seamless flow migration without network support, and extensively evaluate their effectiveness using our field collected traces of real-life usage. Wait-n-Migrate leverages the fact that most flows are short lived. It establishes new flows on newly available networks but allows pre-existing flows on the old network to terminate naturally, effectively decreasing, or even eliminating, connectivity gaps during network switches. Resumption Agent takes advantage of the functionality ...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: CORR
• Authors: Ahmad Rahmati, Clayton Shepard, Chad Tossell, Angela Nicoara, Lin Zhong, Philip T. Kortum, Jatinder Pal Singh
• Keywords: CORR 2010, Education, IPhone 3GS, Mobile Devices, User Disruptions