Delay analysis of social group multicast-aided content dissemination in cellular system

Based on the common interest of mobile users (MUs) in a social group, the dissemination of content across the social group is studied as a powerful supplement to conventional cellular communication with the goal of improving the delay performance of the content dissemination process. The content popularity is modelled by a Zipf distribution in order to characterize the MUs’ different interests in different contents. The Factor of Altruism (FA) terminology is introduced for quantifying the willingness of content owners to share their content. We model the dissemination process of a specific packet by a pure-birth based Markov chain and evaluate the statistical properties of both the network’s dissemination delay as well as of the individual user-delay. Compared to the conventional base station (BS)- aided multicast, our scheme is capable of reducing the average dissemination delay by about 56.5%. Moreover, in contrast to the BS-aided multicast, increasing the number of MUs in the target social group is capable of reducing the average individual userdelay by 44.1% relying on our scheme. Furthermore, our scheme is more suitable for disseminating a popular piece of content

Flooding Data in a Cell: Is Cellular Multicast Better than Device-to-Device Communications?

International audienceA natural method to disseminate popular data on cellular networks is to use multicast. Despite having clear advantages over unicast, multicast does not offer any kind of reliability and could result costly in terms of cellular resources in the case at least one of the destinations is at the edge of the cell (i.e., with poor radio conditions). In this paper, we show that, when content dissemination tolerates some delay, providing device-to-device communications over an orthogonal channel increases the efficiency of multicast, concurring also to offload part of the traffic from the infrastructure. Our evaluation simulates an LTE macro-cell with mobile receivers and reveals that the joint utilization of device-to-device communications and multicasting brings significant resource savings while increasing the cellular throughput