Performance evaluation of opportunistic temporal-pairing access network (OPAN)

Content distribution from wired to wireless domain has traditionally being perceived as the problem of wireless last-hop extension. We argue that increasing the physical transmission capability at the last hop bottleneck alone will not be sufficient to cater for throughput demands and come up with a network architecture which can be tailored favorably for content distribution within mobile and wireless milieu called Opportunistic temporal-Pairing Access Network (OPAN). By carefully coordinate direct node-to-node ambient burst data communication “inside” the wireless access (infrastructure) network, it is possible to create a structure where the traffic load on the last-hop downlink path is greatly minimized. If such setup is then augmented with the knowledge of end users' mobility and the exploitation of spatial reuse techniques and careful packet scheduling, the effective system throughput capacity as well as the data diffusion time can be improved significantly compared to the simple unicasting in infrastructure networks. We show that OPAN is not only capable of achieving a downlink capacity improvement of, conservatively, one order of magnitude, but also able to maintain a faster overall data diffusion time.