Go this way: navigation for better access quality in mobile networks

  • Authors:

  • Cong Shi;Haiyong Xie

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou, China

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the eighth ACM international workshop on Mobility in the evolving internet architecture
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Despite the wide deployment of mobile network infrastructure, mobile users still experience varying network quality. We posit that it is caused by the combined effects of the imbalanced geographic coverage of mobile networks and users' lacking (and thus ignoring) such information when choosing their travel paths. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, network-oriented navigation (NetNavi), for mobile users to improve their network access on a trip. More specifically, we overlay the physical road map with mobile network performance maps to find paths satisfying user needs on both network quality and travel delay. Through evaluations of two major cellular networks on three maps of different scales and locations, we show that NetNavi can significantly improve network access quality at low cost for mobile users, increasing the average download throughput by 67.5% for 67.6% source-destination pairs with only 11.4% extra travel delay (and as significant as 193.8% with only 3% extra travel delay in some cases). Our results, although preliminary, demonstrate the great potentials of improving network access quality for mobile users, without even changing network infrastructure or mobile applications.