Evaluating device-to-device content delivery potential on a mobile ISP´s dataset

Device-to-Device (D2D) content delivery is an emerging approach, where end-user devices exchange content with other end-user devices in communication range, instead of retrieving content from an operator´s infrastructure. This way, the operator network can be offloaded from congestion caused by the transmission of popular content, and the content consumer´s quality of experience may increase. However, D2D content delivery is only effective in situations where a device in proximity has the requested content available, which is more likely to happen with popular content in crowded areas. The availability of content in communication range of a consumer constitutes an upper bound of the success of a D2D content delivery mechanism, which is referred to as the potential of D2D delivery. This paper provides a quantitative answer to the question of this potential, and identifies the most important properties a D2D mechanism must provide. An evaluation model is proposed and developed, which can be applied to real-world mobile user traces to determine the quota of content requests that could be served via D2D content delivery. The model is applied on a dataset of a major European Internet service provider and the evaluation results are discussed. The paper concludes that there is potential to deliver up to 60% of requests for popular content via D2D, if a reliable mechanism to predict a user´s content consumption is available.