Selecting proper wireless network interfaces for user experience enhancement with guaranteed probability

With the increasing capabilities of mobile phones, mobile users access data via wireless interfaces pervasively. Although WiFi has limited coverage and resulted in a bigger delay of data access, it is not uncommon that mobile users are willing to use WiFi to transmit data to decrease communication costs instead of 3G. Hence it is reasonable to use delay tolerance strategies to balance execution time, energy consumption, and communication cost. In this paper, we model mobile user experience as a combination of three random variables (energy consumption, execution time and communication cost). We present a wireless interface scheduling algorithm to select proper wireless interfaces for a set of data-dependent sporadic tasks to enhance user experience under the constraints of execution time, energy consumption, and communication cost with a guaranteed confidence probability in a delay-tolerant environment. The experimental results show that our approach can effectively enhance the user experience. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.