From Feast to Famine: Managing Mobile Network Resources Across Environments and Preferences

Mobile devices regularly move between feast and famine—environments that differ greatly in the capacity and cost of available network resources. Managing these resources effectively is an important aspect of a user’s mobile experience. However, preferences for resource management vary across users, time, and operating conditions, and user and application interests may not align. Furthermore, today’s mobile OS mechanisms are typically coarse-grained, inflexible, and scattered across system and application settings. Users must adopt a "one size fits all" solution or micro-manage their devices.

This paper introduces Tango, a platform for managing network resource usage through a programmatic model that expresses user and app interests (“policies”). Tango centralizes policy expression and enforcement in a controller process that monitors device state and adjusts network usage according to a user’s (potentially dynamic) interests. To align interests and leverage app-specific knowledge, Tango uses a constraint model that informs apps of network limitations so they can optimize their usage. We evaluate how to design policies that account for data limits, user experience, and battery life. We demonstrate how Tango improves individual network-intensive apps like music streaming, as well as conditions when multiple apps compete for limited resources.