Network coding-based content distribution in cellular access networks

Mobile cloud applications have become extremely popular in the last years. Location-based services, navigation, online gaming and social networking are a representative set of “always on” cloud applications in which the same or partially overlapping content is delivered to multiple users. Network coding is a well matching solution to improve content delivery. In this paper we propose the vNC-CELL technique, which uses network coding to combine information flows carrying the same or overlapping content that has to be delivered to co-located users. vNC-CELL executes coding functionalities in a mobile cloud through virtualization as these operations are computationally intensive if performed locally at the base station. Performance evaluation obtained from NS-3 simulations confirms vNC-CELL ability to improve network throughput and reduce download times for the users.