Effects of Content Popularity on the Performance of Content-Centric Opportunistic Networking: An Analytical Approach and Applications

TL;DR

This paper develops an analytical model to understand how content popularity and availability influence the performance of content-centric opportunistic networks, aiding in optimizing data offloading strategies.

Contribution

It introduces a novel analytical framework that quantifies the impact of interest patterns on delay and success probability in opportunistic networking.

Findings

Popularity and availability significantly affect access delay and success rates.

The model accurately predicts performance metrics validated by real-world datasets.

Insights enable optimization of mobile data offloading strategies.

Abstract

Mobile users are envisioned to exploit direct communication opportunities between their portable devices, in order to enrich the set of services they can access through cellular or WiFi networks. Sharing contents of common interest or providing access to resources or services between peers can enhance a mobile node's capabilities, offload the cellular network, and disseminate information to nodes without Internet access. Interest patterns, i.e. how many nodes are interested in each content or service (popularity), as well as how many users can provide a content or service (availability) impact the performance and feasibility of envisioned applications. In this paper, we establish an analytical framework to study the effects of these factors on the delay and success probability of a content/service access request through opportunistic communication. We also apply our framework to the mobile data offloading problem and provide insights for the optimization of its performance. We validate our model and results through realistic simulations, using datasets of real opportunistic networks.