Effects of Content Popularity on the Performance of Content-Centric Opportunistic Networking: An Analytical Approach and Applications

摘要

Mobile users are envisioned to exploit direct communication opportunitiesbetween their portable devices, in order to enrich the set of services they canaccess through cellular or WiFi networks. Sharing contents of common interestor providing access to resources or services between peers can enhance a mobilenode's capabilities, offload the cellular network, and disseminate informationto nodes without Internet access. Interest patterns, i.e. how many nodes areinterested in each content or service (popularity), as well as how many userscan provide a content or service (availability) impact the performance andfeasibility of envisioned applications. In this paper, we establish ananalytical framework to study the effects of these factors on the delay andsuccess probability of a content/service access request through opportunisticcommunication. We also apply our framework to the mobile data offloadingproblem and provide insights for the optimization of its performance. Wevalidate our model and results through realistic simulations, using datasets ofreal opportunistic networks.