On the selection of best devices for cooperative wireless content delivery

Abstract

Thanks to the smart device revolution, modern wireless devices have increased computational/storage capabilities and can also support for multiple network interfaces such as cellular and WiFi interfaces. Intelligent utilization of multiple network interfaces can address the problem of cellular traffic congestion and it can also increase the frequency resources of cellular networks. Cooperative content distribution (CCD) is one such technique that can be performed by using multiple wireless interfaces. In CCD, a device receives content from a base station on its cellular interface and distributes it to other devices in its vicinity through another wireless interface such as WiFi. However, due to the broadcast nature of the secondary links such as WiFi, even a single bad link can serve as a bottleneck in terms of the CCD performance. To address this problem, in this paper, we propose a device selection method for CCD that takes into account both the primary (cellular) and secondary link (WiFi/short-range) network interfaces. The proposed method incurs little overhead as it utilizes information such as acknowledgement of data packets, that already exists in the network. We evaluate and compare (with the other content delivery methods) the performance of the proposed method in terms of: 1) Number of carriers utilized by a cellular base station (BS); 2) Average bits-per-Joule performance; and 3) The average time required to deliver a content file. Moreover, we also take into account the impact of the presence of independent competing/interfering links (such as competing users in the unlicensed band) on the performance of the proposed method.