SCoD: Saving cellular resources by delaying transmissions of popular content

Abstract

At a time when operators struggle with unprecedented mobile data growth, saving cellular resources is of utmost importance. The first traffic that we must get rid of is redundant traffic. This happens, for example, when popular data must be disseminated to a population of subscribers. We propose SCoD, a strategy that benefits from the delay-tolerance of some applications to defer transmissions to appropriate instants. The idea is to wait for nodes to gather around a minimum number of access points so that the total number of transmissions is reduced. SCoD leverages as much as possible node mobility for the sake of clustering; to this end, SCoD relies on different guiding functions that trigger, whenever appropriate, a transmission. We assess the performance of our strategy by running simulations on a realistic vehicular dataset and find out that it leads to significant improvements when compared with traditional (instantaneous) dissemination strategies.