Offloading through Opportunistic Networks with Dynamic Content Requests

Offloading is gaining momentum as a technique to overcome the cellular capacity crunch due to the surge of mobile data traffic demand. Multiple offloading techniques are currently under investigation, from modifications inside the cellular network architecture, to integration of multiple wireless broadband infrastructures, to exploiting direct communications between mobile devices. In this paper we focus on the latter type of offloading, and specifically on offloading through opportunistic networks. As opposed to most of the literature looking at this type of offloading, in this paper we consider the case where requests for content are non-synchronised, i.e. users request content at random points in time. We support this scenario through a very simple offloading scheme, whereby no epidemic dissemination occurs in the opportunistic network. Thus our scheme is minimally invasive for users’ mobile devices, as it uses only minimally their resources. Then, we provide an analysis on the efficiency of our offloading mechanism (in terms of percentage of offloaded traffic) in representative vehicular settings, where content needs to be delivered to (subsets of the) users in specific geographical areas. Depending on various parameters, we show that a simple and resource-savvy offloading scheme can nevertheless offload a very large fraction of the traffic (up to more than 90%, and always more than 20%). We also highlight configurations where such a technique is less effective, and therefore a more aggressive use of mobile nodes resources would be needed.