Async: De-congestion and yield management in cellular data networks

Abstract

We design and implement a novel system called Async, which enables a mobile network operator (MNO) to efficiently manage the growth of mobile data by leveraging the delay-elastic nature of certain applications and the price-sensitive nature of certain users. Specifically, Async introduces an alternate "asynchronous" content-delivery paradigm for heavy content (e.g., videos), and facilitates an MNO to negotiate with users a delay in delivery in exchange for appropriate incentives. The MNO uses the negotiated delays to actively manage Async flows to reduce congestion and improve the quality-of-experience (QoE) of both delayed and regular flows. We show that in comparison to stateof-the-art, Async's network-based flow management enhances QoE for more than 30% of the regular flows, with up to 60% improvement in per-flow QoE metric, while still meeting the negotiated delivery times of 95% of the delayed flows. Async also lowers the delivery times of delayed flows by ∼67% and significantly increases robustness to traffic unpredictability. Our design is robust to disconnections and does not require any modifications to existing network infrastructure and protocols. Our prototype deployment (using Apache's mod proxy and an Android app) on live networks confirms Async's efficacy in meeting EDTs for diverse deployment scenarios.

GreenSlice: Enabling renewable energy powered cellular base stations using asynchronous delivery

“…We refer to the deferrable flows as the background flows while the non-deferrable flows as the foreground flows. We use the price-deadline computation as in [17] to generate appropriate deadlines for the deferrable flows. The deadlines range from 2 time intervals (half-hour) to 16 time intervals (4 hours).…”

“…In this context, there have been some recent works on asynchronous content delivery to de-peak traffic congestion in cellular networks [16], [17]. These models essentially enable the operators and users to defer the content consumption to reduce the instantaneous load.…”