When David Helps Goliath: The Case For 3g Onloading

Access link can often be the bottleneck for application performance. In this paper, we propose to augment wired connections using cellular ones, that we term "3G onloading (3GOL)". 3GOL utilizes available mobile devices and alreadypaid- for data volumes to augment and improve performance of applications on wired network. We motivate 3GOL by understanding bottlenecks present in the wired and the cellular networks. In order to understand the potential benefits of 3GOL, we conduct active experiments using mobile devices. We show that capacity gains can scale linearly with the number of devices on the downlink while also seeing improvements on the uplink. Using real traces we show how video on demand can benefit with 3GOL, even when volume caps are in place. We design 3GOL as an over the top service, and highlight research challenges.