Information Dissemination in Mobile CDNs

With the recent development of technologies in wireless access and mobile devices, the mobile network has become a key component of today’s Internet vision [1, 46]. Current mobile networks, which are being deployed worldwide, enable mobility features to new applications and also extend existing wired Web applications to mobile terminals. The mobile wireless network offers a rich assortment of dynamic and interactive services, such as GPS navigation information, mobile TV, vehicular traffic information, and location-oriented services. The provision of such services requires techniques to disseminate data as efficiently as possible in order to minimize the total network traffic and to improve the mean response time to mobile users. In the wired Web, network performance can be substantially enhanced by using additional bandwidth, which is often available at low cost. However, this approach is impractical for mobile wireless network infrastructures. Most of these networks have fixed spectrum and achievable data rate is fundamentally limited by interference [46]. This problem is likely to get more serious when more mobile users start using bandwidth-intensive services such as streaming media. In this context, caching and prefetching might be a solution. Specifically, these approaches have been extensively used in the wired Web to optimize the amount of bandwidth consumption by shifting the traffic away from overloaded content providers and closer to the content customers [43]. Although these methods offer several benefits (i.e. conservation of network resources and reduced latency), the dissemination of dynamic content and resource-hungry applications (e.g. multimedia applications) remain a challenge.