CarrierMix: How much can user-side carrier mixing help?

Energy consumption for cellular communication is increasingly gaining importance in smartphone battery lifetime as the bandwidth of wireless communication and the demand for mobile traffic increase. For energy-efficient cellular communication, we tackle two energy characteristics of cellular networks: (1) transmission energy highly varies upon channel condition, and (2) transmission of a packet accompanies unnecessary tail energy waste. Under the objective of transmitting packets when the best channel is provided as well as a number of packets are accumulated, we propose a new mobile collaboration framework "CarrierMix" that aggregates smart devices across multiple heterogeneous cellular carriers. Compared to the standalone operation, even without a buffering delay, CarrierMix allows better channel and reduces more tail energy in a statistical point of view. To maximize the energy benefit while maintaining the fairness among the nodes in collaboration, we further develop a dynamic programming framework providing the optimal algorithm of CarrierMix and its approximated heuristic. Trace-driven simulations on our experimental HSPA/ EVDO/LTE network traces show that CarrierMix of five devices achieves up to 42 percent of energy reduction.