Content Distribution Strategies in Opportunistic Networks

The use of mobile data services is in high demand ever since the advent of smartphones and is expected to increase further with the evolution of various services and applications for future mobile devices. This excessive use of data has caused severe bottlenecks within the mobile networks due to overloading. The route towards network upgrades is an expensive one especially due to the high licensing fees attached to spectrum acquisition. Traffic offloading through opportunistic communication is a new paradigm exploiting the meeting opportunities within emerging Mobile Social Networks for the dissemination of delay tolerant contents without any additional investment. The idea is to save the network bandwidth by pushing the content optimally to as few users as possible from base station and then exploit the social interactions of social group members for content distribution among themselves by using point to point communications through WiFi or Bluetooth. Several studies suggests that there exists strong community architecture within contact graph of Mobile Social Networks i.e. the edges are not randomly distributed over nodes but in the form of clusters. We study the problem of dissemination of a large file in community based mobile social network where base station seeds the contents of the file initially to some users within each community. Furthermore, we determine whether it is more efficient in terms of latency and number of transmissions to transfer encoded or uncoded contents during opportunistic meetings by comparing different coded (Network Coding, Erasure Coding) and uncoded (Flooding, Epidemic Routing) data dissemination strategies in mobile social network.