SoftOffload: An SDN Platform for Mobile Offloading

Intelligent mobile traffic offloading over collaborative WiFi-cellular networks

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Description

SoftOffload is an open-source software defined platform for achieving intelligent mobile data offloading. It collects various traffic context from both end-users and network operators, and performs optimal mobile offloading to increase user-side throughput and reduce network congestion. The platform runs on the Floodlight SDN controller with Click-based offloading agents and SoftOffload extensions for mobile devices. By benefiting from the openness of OpenFlow and SDN community, SoftOffload stands out as an extensible and programmable platform to advance future development in 5G mobile networks.

The SoftOffload development is carried out in the EIT-SDN project, as a joint work between University of Helsinki and University of Cambridge.

Demo Video


Source Code

You can find the latest version in our GitHub repository »

Unless specified otherwise, all releases are under Apache License 2.0

Highlights

Publications

  1. "Vision: Augmenting WiFi Offloading with An Open-source Collaborative Platform" (full paper)
    Aaron Yi Ding, Yanhe Liu, Sasu Tarkoma, Hannu Flinck, Henning Schulzrinne, Jon Crowcroft,
    6th ACM International Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing and Services (MobiCom MCS), Paris, France, September 2015.

  2. "An Open-source Software Defined Platform for Collaborative and Energy-aware WiFi Offloading" (extended abstract)
    Aaron Yi Ding, Yanhe Liu, Sasu Tarkoma, Hannu Flinck, Jon Crowcroft,
    21st ACM Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking (ACM MobiCom), Conference Proceedings Demo Track, Paris, France, September 2015.

  3. "SoftOffload: A Programmable Approach Toward Collaborative Mobile Traffic Offloading" (extended abstract)
    Aaron Yi Ding, Jon Crowcroft, Sasu Tarkoma
    12th ACM International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services (ACM MobiSys), Conference Proceedings Poster Track, Bretton Woods, NH, USA, June 2014.

  4. "Software Defined 5G Mobile Backhaul" (full paper)
    Jose Costa-Requena, Raimo Kantola, Aaron Yi Ding, Jukka Manner, Yanhe Liu, Sasu Tarkoma
    1st IEEE International Conference on 5G for Ubiquitous Connectivityn (IEEE 5GU), Lapland, Finland, 2014.

  5. "Software-Defined Networking in Mobile Access Networks"
    Yanhe Liu, Aaron Yi Ding, Sasu Tarkoma
    University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Technical Report, Series of Publications C-2013-1, Helsinki. Finland, September 2013.

Thesis from SoftOffload project

  1. "An SDN Platform for Traffic Offloading"
    Yanhe Liu
    University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science, Master's Thesis, ISSN 1457-7070, 2015.

The SoftOffload Team

Aaron Aaron Yi DING is leading the SoftOffload project. The development of SoftOffload is partially done during his research visit in the IRT Lab at Columbia University, New York, hosted by Prof. Henning Schulzrinne. Aaron's recent publications can be found on his homepage: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/yding/

Yanhe Yanhe Liu is the key developer of SoftOffload. His research activities mainly relate to the intersection of mobile systems, distributed systems and networking. He received his M.Sc. in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki. Before coming to Helsinki, he worked at TP-LINK Research China.

Sasu Sasu Tarkoma received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science. He is full professor at University of Helsinki, Department of Computer Science and Head of the networking and services specialization line. He has managed and participated in national and international research projects at the University of Helsinki, Aalto University, and Helsinki Institute for Information Technology (HIIT). He has worked in the IT industry as a consultant and chief system architect as well as principal researcher and laboratory expert at Nokia Research Center. His interests include mobile computing, Internet technologies, and middleware. He can be reached at sasu.tarkoma@helsinki.fi

Jon Jon Crowcroft is the Marconi Professor of Communications Systems in the Computer Lab, at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Wolfson College. He graduated in Physics from Trinity College, Cambridge University in 1979, received an MSc in Computing in 1981, and PhD in 1993 both from UCL. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society, the ACM, the British Computer Society, the IE[ET] the Royal Academy of Engineering and the IEEE. He received the ACM SIGCOMM award in 2009 for lifetime contribution to the field of communication networks.