Demo: D2D Rescue of Overloaded Cellular Channels

Mobile data traffic is set to triple in three years from now according to Cisco. This trend is a real challenge for operators since wireless capacity is bounded. To boost network capacity further, operators think about paradigm-shifting solutions to relieve their infrastructures. Recently, data offloading received increasing attention from the research community. Operators may leverage unused bandwidth across different technologies to shift part of the traffic onto less critical infrastructure (e.g., through Wi-Fi access points). In a further evolution, they can also benefit from the widespread diffusion of smart mobile devices with multiple communication interfaces. Users become the heart of the offloading strategy by employing multi-hop opportunistic communications to improve content dissemination, while reducing the load on the wireless infrastructure. We propose an architecture that takes advantage of the latest advances in opportunistic networking to achieve efficient traffic offloading. In this approach, terminals are under continuous control of the operator - the cellular infrastructure serves as a control channel to track data dissemination. The demonstration builds on DROiD [2] as injection strategy, and Epics [1] to distribute data opportunistically.