Socket intents: leveraging application awareness for multi-access connectivity

In today's Internet, almost all end devices have multiple interfaces built in. This enables users to seamlessly switch between different access networks or even use them simultaneously; to better use the resources available to them and to better satisfy their needs. This is referred to as mobile data offloading and has received lots of attention recently in both the research community and in the industry. However, all the proposed data solutions either rely on static configuration policies or are reactive rather than proactive with regards to the application needs.

In this paper, we propose a proactive, application informed approach, Socket Intents. Socket Intents augment the socket interface to enable the application to express what it knows about its communication patterns and preferences. This information can then be used by our proactive policies to choose the appropriate interface, tune the network parameters, or even combine multiple interfaces. We provide a prototype implementation of our Socket Intents and present a first evaluation of the Intents and its benefits.