On Leveraging Partial Paths in Partially-Connected Networks

Mobile wireless network research focuses on scenarios at the extremes of the network connectivity continuum where the probability of all nodes being connected is either close to unity, assuming connected paths between all nodes (mobile ad hoc networks), or it is close to zero, assuming no multi-hop paths exist at all (delay-tolerant networks). In this paper, we argue that a sizable fraction of networks lies between these extremes and is characterized by the existence of partial paths, i.e. multi-hop path segments that allow forwarding data closer to the destination even when no end-to-end path is available. A fundamental issue in such networks is dealing with disruptions of end-to-end paths. Under a stochastic model, we compare the performance of the established end-to-end retransmission (ignoring partial paths), against a forwarding mechanism that leverages partial paths to forward data closer to the destination even during disruption periods. Perhaps surprisingly, the alternative mechanism is not necessarily superior. However, under a stochastic monotonicity condition between current v.s. future path length, which we demonstrate to hold in typical network models, we manage to prove superiority of the alternative mechanism in stochastic dominance terms. We believe that this study could serve as a foundation to design more efficient data transfer protocols for partially-connected networks, which could potentially help reducing the gap between applications that can be supported over disconnected networks and those requiring full connectivity.Comment: Extended version of paper appearing at IEEE INFOCOM 2009, April 20-25, Rio de Janeiro, Brazi

A Swiss Army Knife for Online Caching in Small Cell Networks

We consider a dense cellular network, in which a limited-size cache is available at every base station (BS). Coordinating content allocation across the different caches can lead to significant performance gains, but is a difficult problem even when full information about the network and the request process is available. In this paper we present qLRU-Δ, a general-purpose online caching policy that can be tailored to optimize different performance metrics also in presence of coordinated multipoint transmission techniques. The policy requires neither direct communication among BSs, nor a priori knowledge of content popularity and, under stationary request processes, has provable performance guarantees

MobiTrade: Trading Content in Disruption Tolerant Networks

International audienceThe rapid proliferation of advanced mobile devices has created a growing demand for data content. Existing approaches (e.g. relying on cellular infrastructures) cannot keep up with the large volume of content generated and requested, without the deployment of new expensive infrastructure. Exchanging content of interest opportunistically, when two nodes are in range, presents a low cost and high bandwidth alternative for popular, bulky content. Yet, efficiently collecting, storing, and sharing the content while preventing selfish users from impairing collaborative ones, poses major challenges. In this paper, we present MobiTrade, a collaborative content dissemination system on top of a delay tolerant network. It allows users to head out in the real world, express locally their interests, and wait to get notified whenever an encountered device has content(s) matching these interests. Even though interactions are done between neighboring wireless devices (locally), MobiTrade implements a trading scheme that motivates mobile devices to act as merchants and carry content across the network to satisfy each other's interests. Users continuously profile the type of content requested and the collaboration level of encountered devices. Based on this knowledge, an appropriate utility function is used to rank these requests and collect an optimal inventory of data that maximizes the expected value of stored content for future encounters. Using NS3 simulations based on synthetic and real mobility traces, we show that MobiTrade achieves up to 2 times higher query success rates compared to other content dissemination schemes. Furthermore, we show that MobiTrade successfully isolates selfish, non-collaborative devices. Finally, using a simple game theoretic framework we show that turning on our MobiTrade mechanism is an efficient Nash Equilibrium

Quality of Experience-Aware Mobile Edge Caching through a Vehicular Cloud

International audienceDensification through small cells and caching in base stations have been proposed to deal with the increasing demand for Internet content and the related overload on the cellular infrastructure. However, these solutions are expensive to install and maintain. Instead, using vehicles acting as mobile caches might represent an interesting alternative. In our work, we assume that users can query nearby vehicles for some time, and be redirected to the cellular infrastructure when the deadline expires. Beyond reducing costs, in such an architecture, through vehicle mobility, a user sees a much larger variety of locally accessible content within only few minutes. Unlike most of the related works on delay tolerant access, we consider the impact on the user experience by assigning different retrieval deadlines per content. In our paper, we provide the following contributions: (i) we model analytically such a scenario; (ii) we formulate an optimization problem to maximize the traffic offloaded while ensuring user experience guarantees; (iii) we propose two variable deadline policies; (iv) we perform realistic trace-based simulations, and we show that, even with low technology penetration rate, more than 60% of the total traffic can be offloaded which is around 20% larger compared to existing allocation policies

Utility-based Message Replication for Intermittently Connected Heterogeneous Networks

Communication networks (wired or wireless) have traditionally been assumed to be connected at least most of the time. However, emerging applications such as emergency response, special operations, smart environments, VANETs, etc. coupled with node heterogeneity and volatile links (e.g. due to wireless propagation phenomena and node mobility) will likely change the typical conditions under which networks operate. In fact, in such scenarios, networks may be mostly disconnected, i.e., most of the time, end-to-end paths connecting every node pair do not exist. To cope with frequent, long-lived disconnections, {\em opportunistic routing} techniques have been proposed in which, at every hop, a node decides whether it should either forward and/or store-and-carry a message. As a result, a number of message replicas may be created and routed independently (``spraying''). Most opportunistic routing schemes to-date perform {\em greedy} replication handing over a copy of a message to the first nodes encountered. Yet, in a network with heterogeneous nodes, where some nodes may be much ``better'' relays than others, such greedy schemes waste a lot of message replicas (and thus energy, storage space, etc.) on ``useless'' relays. For this reason, we propose the idea of \emph{utility-based replication}, where some \emph{fitness} or \emph{utility} function is maintained for all nodes in a distributed fashion, and a small budget of message replicas is allocated according to this utility only to the fittest nodes. We describe a number of variations using different utility functions, and show that an improvement of up to 5-6 times in delay can be achieved over greedy algorithms