Relieving the wireless infrastructure: When opportunistic networks meet guaranteed delays

• Published in: 2011 IEEE International Symposium on a World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks pp. 1 - 10
• Main Authors: Whitbeck, J., Amorim, M., Lopez, Y., Leguay, J., Conan, V.
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01-06-2011
• Subjects: Argon; Mobile communication; Vehicles
• ISBN: 9781457703522; 1457703521
• DOI: 10.1109/WoWMoM.2011.5986466

Major wireless operators are nowadays facing network capacity issues in striving to meet the growing demands of mobile users. At the same time, 3G-enabled devices increasingly benefit from ad hoc radio connectivity (e.g., Wi-Fi). In this context of hybrid connectivity, we propose Push-and-track, a content dissemination framework that harnesses ad hoc communication opportunities to minimize the load on the wireless infrastructure while guaranteeing tight delivery delays. It achieves this through a control loop that collects user-sent acknowledgements to determine if new copies need to be reinjected into the network through the 3G interface. Push-and-Track includes multiple strategies to determine how many copies of the content should be injected, when, and to whom. The short delay-tolerance of common content, such as news or road traffic updates, make them suitable for such a system. Based on a realistic large-scale vehicular dataset from the city of Bologna composed of more than 10,000 vehicles, we demonstrate that Push-and-Track consistently meets its delivery objectives while reducing the use of the 3G network by over 90%.