Big Data Offloading using Smart Public Vehicles with Software Defined Connectivity

With the explosive increase in the number of mobile devices such as smartphones or laptops, the design of mobile applications becomes increasingly complex, power hungry and resource consuming. Therefore, conventional networks are facing serious problems such as traffic overload and energy consumption due to high traffic demands. As a result, network designers are looking for more options to accommodate numerous data requirements. Aiming to find a promising way to tackle this problem, we are investigating heterogeneous networking architectures, which utilize the existing public transport network as an alternative communication network along with infrastructure-based networks. We propose a heterogeneous network architecture called Software Defined Connectivity (SDC) that utilizes the flow of transport network such as buses, trains, and ferries to start the forwarding process from nearby parking/offloading spots to disseminate data along with conventional networks. Results show that the SDC architecture helps in data offloading over public transport vehicles as per the profiles of each user with significant savings of energy.