On content-centric wireless delivery networks

The flux of social media and the convenience of mobile connectivity have created a mobile data phenomenon that is expected to overwhelm mobile cellular networks in the foreseeable future. Despite the advent of 4G/LTE, the growth rate of wireless data has far exceeded the capacity increase of mobile networks. A fundamentally new design paradigm is required to tackle the ever growing wireless data challenge. In this article, we investigate the problem of massive content delivery over wireless networks, and present a systematic view of content-centric network design and its underlying challenges. Toward this end, we first review some of the recent advancements in information-centric networking, which provide the basis of how media contents can be labeled, distributed, and placed across the networks. We then formulate the content delivery task into a content rate maximization problem over a shared wireless channel, which, in contrast to the conventional wisdom that attempts to increase the bit rate of a unicast system, maximizes the content delivery capability with a fixed amount of wireless resources. This conceptually simple change enables us to exploit the content diversity and network diversity by leveraging the abundant computation sources (through application-layer encoding, pushing and caching, etc.) within the existing wireless networks. A network architecture that enables wireless network crowdsourcing for content delivery is then described, followed by an exemplary campus wireless network that encompasses the above concepts.