On Accelerating Content Delivery in Mobile Networks

Owing to the imminent fixed mobile convergence, Internet applications are frequently accessed through mobile devices. Given limited bandwidth and unreliable wireless channels, content delivery in mobile networks usually experiences long delay. To accelerate content delivery in mobile networks, many solutions have been proposed. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey of most relevant research activities for content delivery acceleration in mobile networks. We first investigate the live network measurements, and identify the network obstacles that dominate the content delivery delays. Then, we classify existing content delivery acceleration solutions in mobile networks into three categories: mobile system evolution, content and network optimization, and mobile data offloading, and provide an overview of available solutions in each category. Finally, we survey the content delivery acceleration solutions tailored for web content delivery and multimedia delivery. For web content delivery acceleration, we overview existing web content delivery systems and summarize their features. For multimedia delivery acceleration, we focus on accelerating HTTP-based adaptive streaming while briefly review other multimedia delivery acceleration solutions. This paper presents a timely survey on content delivery acceleration in mobile networks, and provides a comprehensive reference for further research in this field.