Motivation
The advent of mobile social network applications and services is drastically extending the notion of connectivity, significantly beyond the traditional communication and networking meaning. In the next few years, the traditional mobile networking approach of current cellular networks will ultimately prove insufficient to cope with the burgeoning traffic demand generated by smartphone users. The divergence of mobile data traffic and data revenue growth is increasing the pressure on mobile network operators to find effective and efficient ways to handle the data traffic that is swamping their networks.
Focus
In the MACACO project, we specifically identify the caching of contents at different points of the mobile network as the lever to fill the gap between the capacity granted by the infrastructure technology and the traffic load generated by mobile users. We aim at
extending the caching models to a brand new field, i.e., that of mobile networking. Also, due to the multi-facet and highly complex nature of mobile-access networks, we will integrate the caching approach with social context awareness and opportunistic resource availability.
Our approach implies
- re-thinking the data management plane of the whole mobile network, moving it towards a content-centric networking paradigm
- the pervasive adoption of mobile social-context-aware caching decisions at both the edge wireless infrastructure and the mobile terminals.
In conclusion, MACACO brings together mobile context awareness and content-centric
networking in the scenario of mobile networks. The original framework developed in the
project is expected to significantly improve the utilization of resources at both the edge
wireless network and end-user device.
