Relieving the Wireless Infrastructure: When Opportunistic Networks Meet Guaranteed Delays

TL;DR

This paper introduces Push-and-Track, a hybrid content dissemination framework that leverages ad hoc networks to significantly reduce wireless infrastructure load while ensuring timely delivery of short-delay content.

Contribution

It presents a novel control loop and strategies for content injection in hybrid networks, proven effective with large-scale vehicular data.

Findings

Reduces 3G network usage by over 90%

Consistently meets delivery delay targets

Effective in vehicular network scenarios

Abstract

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%.