LTE or WiFi? Client-Side Internet link selection for smartphones.

Current mobile phones and tablets are equipped with two technologies for accessing the Internet: WiFi and Cellular. Deciding which of these two interfaces provides faster data transfer is often non-trivial, but most of the currently used devices use a simple priority scheme that prefers WiFi to Cellular. In this paper, we propose a novel system that automatically selects the best link available in the current user location. The system periodically probes the bandwidth available on both links and makes statistical predictions, while avoiding excessive data and battery usage. We experimentally validated our approach using a dedicated application for Android.