Application-centric content delivery schemes for future wireless networks

The apps paradigm is rapidly changing the way in which content is transferred and consumed in mobile networks. Currently, the traffic loads generated by apps are mostly provided as Over-The-Top (OTT) services, essentially transparent to the cellular network operators, while some of the content is delivered and updated in user terminals through “background transmissions”, without user intervention. With increasing traffic volumes, associated to richer content and more advanced devices, the apps paradigm might create severe system inefficiencies. In this paper we explore a number of apps based content delivery methods and investigate their performances on multiple relevant dimensions, such as: terminal energy consumption, time for accessing in-apps content and their impact on the user experience associated with other mobile data services. The proposed methods include opportunistic content pre-fetching and are characterized by different degrees of context-awareness. One approach considers only context information at the individual user terminals, while another one includes network context information and assumes that content distribution coordination is performed by the network operators. The results show that when one is increasing the numbers of apps, whose content needs to be simultaneously maintained updated, only the operator-driven approach can be feasible, mainly from an energetic perspective. However, for a small number of maintained apps, pre-fetching schemes are superior to standard “on-demand” content delivery solutions, suggesting that pre-fetching should be limited only to the subset of terminal apps with higher user access probabilities.