Towards content delivery optimization in future wireless networks

Abstract

The last few years have seen an enormous growth in the usage of smart phones and this trend is expected to continue in the near future with increased processing power and larger form factors. This explosive growth has contributed to an unprecedented adoption of mobile data services and increase in data usage. The demand is also driving the development of next generation networks to support novel data hungry and user-experience focused applications such as virtual reality video. Global mobile data traffic is increasing at an unprecedented rate and video traffic alone currently constitutes about 50% of the total traffic and is predicted to grow up to 70% by 2021 as user preferences are shifting towards more video based applications relative to browsing. The explosion of traffic associated with video content poses significant challenges for mobile content provision. While, on the one hand, mobile video traffic surge is forecasted to require significant investments in bandwidth acquisition, infrastructure deployment and roll-out, on the other hand, users are not likely to be willing to pay significantly more than they are today. Operators would in turn like to charge the content providers for revenue. Furthermore, user expectations for high quality video content is constantly increasing.