Not all content is created equal: effect of popularity and availability for content-centric opportunistic networking

Abstract

Mobile users are envisioned to exploit direct communication opportunities between their portable devices, in order to enrich the set of services they can access through cellular or WiFi networks. Sharing contents of common interest or providing access to resources or services between peers can enhance a mobile node's capabilities, offload the cellular network, and disseminate information to nodes without internet access. Interest patterns, i.e. how many nodes are interested in each content or service (popularity), as well as how many users can provide a content or service (availability) impact the performance and feasibility of envisioned applications. In this paper, we establish an analytical framework to study the effects of these factors on the delay and success probability of a content/service access request through opportunistic communication. We also apply our framework to the data offloading problem and provide insights for its optimization.