Fast and Optimal Scheduling Over Multiple Network Interfaces

Today's mobile phones already contain two or more network interfaces (NICs) and future devices are likely to have several more, each with different energy costs, dollar costs, and data transmission capacities [23]. Given a mobile device that is running multiple data-oriented applications, such as email, instant messenger, and video download, some of which may be delay-tolerant, it becomes necessary to assign, to each unit of application data, the network interface and the time of transmission that maximizes user satisfaction. This scheduling algorithm must take into account not only user, application, and NIC characteristics, but also future opportunistic availability of NICs due to device mobility.