Service Provisioning and Terminal Cooperation in User-Deployed Networks

Exploiting high-speed user-deployed access points (APs) in public infrastructures has been proposed as one of the candidate solutions for reducing the cost of future radio access. A disadvantage is that, due to lack of deployment coordination, these types of network are likely to provide only partial coverage. For this reason, the set of services that could be successfully provided in these networks might be rather limited. In this paper we present a novel framework for modeling non-interactive "infotainment" services with different degrees of "time criticality", and utilize it for investigating the user service perception in "spotty" coverage networks. In order to hide the infrastructure sparsity to the end users, the terminals are assumed equipped with software agents that can "opportunistically" pre-fetch information, on behalf of their users. This can be done when in contact with an AP, or, through a peer-to-peer file exchange with other terminal agents that have previously accessed the same information. In this paper, for different service types, the relationship between AP density and service perception is investigated. Furthermore, the impact of peer-to-peer terminal cooperation is evaluated in respect to both infrastructure requirements and content access delay. The results show that already with moderate AP densities, user-deployed networks deliver acceptable service perception, especially for services with low time criticality. Furthermore, whenever a "critical" mass of users shares common interests, the adoption of a peer-to-peer exchange strategy brings the significant gains of infrastructure reduction and/or improved service perception