  In recent years, offloading mobile traffic through Wi-Fi has emerged as a
potential solution to lower down the communication cost for mobile users. Users
hope to reduce the cost while keeping the delay in an acceptable range through
Wi-Fi offloading. Also, different users have different sensitivities to the
cost and the delay performance. How to make a proper cost-delay tradeoff
according to the user's preference is the key issue in the design of the
offloading strategy. To address this issue, we propose a preference-oriented
offloading strategy for current commercial terminals, which transmit traffic
only via one channel simultaneously. We model the strategy as a three-state
M/MMSP/1 queueing system, of which the service process is a Markov modulated
service process (MMSP), and obtain the structured solutions by establishing a
hybrid embedded Markov chain. Our analysis shows that, given the user's
preference, there exists an optimal deadline to maximize the utility, which is
defined as the linear combination of the cost and the delay. We also provide a
method to select the optimal deadline. Our simulation demonstrates that this
strategy with the optimal deadline can achieve a good performance.
