Opportunistic Mobile Networks Content Delivery for Important but Non-Urgent Traffic

As delay-tolerant and large-size content, for example, software updates, TV series, and virtual reality related content, become more prevalent in mobile networks, the need for efficient content delivery mechanisms becomes increasingly important,the traffic that carries these contents is not suitable to be evaluated using traditional network performance metrics, e.g., delay, throughput, and jitter. Based on this insight, we propose the solution of content dissemination from opportunistic mobile social communications (CODOMOC)which utilizes energy cost as an alternative performance metric and exploits daily human activity mobility pattern to determine how, when, and where the contents should be disseminated. Then, we introduce two options in CODOMOC to achieve different network operators’ objectives. The two options are the Only Dense (OD) option which aims at minimizing energy consumption for network operators and the Broadcast Efficiency (BE) option to further reduce the total carbon footprint of network operators. CODOMOC is evaluated by comparing with a mobility-based broadcast method. The results show that CODOMOC reduces the average energy consumption by 51% and 60% in the OD and BE options respectively. The proposed solution equipped with the two modes is expected to provide a higher degree of flexibility and reduce energy consumption for mobile networks, while, admittedly, the application scope of the solution and the associated methodologies proposed in this paper is restricted to important but non-urgent traffic delivery.