MADServer: An Architecture for Opportunistic Mobile Advanced Delivery

Rapid increases in cellular data traffic demand creative alternative delivery vectors for data. Despite the conceptual attractiveness of mobile data offloading, no concrete web server architectures integrate intelligent offloading in a production-ready and easily deployable manner without relying on vast infrastructural changes to carriers’ networks. Delay-tolerant networking technology offers the means to do just this. We introduce MADServer, a novel DTN-based architecture for mobile data offloading that splits web con- tent among multiple independent delivery vectors based on user and data context. It enables intelligent data offload- ing, caching, and querying solutions which can be incorporated in a manner that still satisfies user expectations for timely delivery. At the same time, it allows for users who have poor or expensive connections to the cellular network to leverage multi-hop opportunistic routing to send and receive data. We also present a preliminary implementation of MADServer and provide real-world performance evaluations

Improving Mobile Video Streaming with Mobility Prediction and Prefetching in Integrated Cellular-WiFi Networks

We present and evaluate a procedure that utilizes mobility and throughput prediction to prefetch video streaming data in integrated cellular and WiFi networks. The effective integration of such heterogeneous wireless technologies will be significant for supporting high performance and energy efficient video streaming in ubiquitous networking environments. Our evaluation is based on trace-driven simulation considering empirical measurements and shows how various system parameters influence the performance, in terms of the number of paused video frames and the energy consumption; these parameters include the number of video streams, the mobile, WiFi, and ADSL backhaul throughput, and the number of WiFi hotspots. Also, we assess the procedure's robustness to time and throughput variability. Finally, we present our initial prototype that implements the proposed approach.Comment: 7 pages, 15 figure

Living on the Edge: The Role of Proactive Caching in 5G Wireless Networks

This article explores one of the key enablers of beyond $4$G wireless networks leveraging small cell network deployments, namely proactive caching. Endowed with predictive capabilities and harnessing recent developments in storage, context-awareness and social networks, peak traffic demands can be substantially reduced by proactively serving predictable user demands, via caching at base stations and users' devices. In order to show the effectiveness of proactive caching, we examine two case studies which exploit the spatial and social structure of the network, where proactive caching plays a crucial role. Firstly, in order to alleviate backhaul congestion, we propose a mechanism whereby files are proactively cached during off-peak demands based on file popularity and correlations among users and files patterns. Secondly, leveraging social networks and device-to-device (D2D) communications, we propose a procedure that exploits the social structure of the network by predicting the set of influential users to (proactively) cache strategic contents and disseminate them to their social ties via D2D communications. Exploiting this proactive caching paradigm, numerical results show that important gains can be obtained for each case study, with backhaul savings and a higher ratio of satisfied users of up to $22\%$ and $26\%$, respectively. Higher gains can be further obtained by increasing the storage capability at the network edge.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Communications Magazin

A Marketplace for Efficient and Secure Caching for IoT Applications in 5G Networks

As the communication industry is progressing towards fifth generation (5G) of cellular networks, the traffic it carries is also shifting from high data rate traffic from cellular users to a mixture of high data rate and low data rate traffic from Internet of Things (IoT) applications. Moreover, the need to efficiently access Internet data is also increasing across 5G networks. Caching contents at the network edge is considered as a promising approach to reduce the delivery time. In this paper, we propose a marketplace for providing a number of caching options for a broad range of applications. In addition, we propose a security scheme to secure the caching contents with a simultaneous potential of reducing the duplicate contents from the caching server by dividing a file into smaller chunks. We model different caching scenarios in NS-3 and present the performance evaluation of our proposal in terms of latency and throughput gains for various chunk sizes