An Experimental Framework to Investigate Context-Aware Schemes for Content Delivery

A novel experimental approach for investigating the performances of context-aware content delivery schemes is presented in this paper. An innovative testbed, capable of remotely controlling multiple terminals, injecting a wide range of traffic loads in real networks and monitoring different performance measures has been developed and utilized for quantifying both the energy costs and user perceived service quality associated with different context- aware content pre-fetching schemes. In the implementation proposed in this paper, the context information required for performing content pre-fetching is extracted and utilized by individual user terminals and does not require any support from mobile operators. The performances of pre-fetching are compared to those of an on-demand content delivery scheme, for both video streaming and file downloading services. The results shows that not only pre-fetching can increase user service appreciation by reducing the time needed to access the information, but it can also significantly lower the amount of energy consumed in user terminals for retrieving the content. Our experiments further indicate that in order to achieve these additional energy gains only limited content prediction capabilities are required, thus making pre-fetching a solid candidate for the provision of a wide range of content types and services in both wide and local area networks.