Building on previous research efforts in the fields of social wireless networking, opportunistic communication and content networking, MACACO will address several issues
- First, it will define solutions for the detection and modelling of correlations between the user mobility – intended information on his/her position, but also on the current environment he/she is in – and the traffic demand he/she generates. This represents an original analysis that has no precedent in the literature, and that will build on a study of original datasets, gathered by participants in the project.
- Second, it will develop techniques to predict the future user mobility at both microscopic (i.e., individual user) and macroscopic (i.e., user communities) levels. To that end, the performance of state-of-art techniques will be assessed against the datasets collected within the project, and improvements will be provided if necessary.
- Third, networking protocols will be defined, that take advantage of the information above so as to determine when to pre-fetch a specific content to a BS, AP or smartphone, with the objective of optimizing the network resource utilization over time. By coupling the mobility prediction and mobility/content demand correlation models, the MACACO framework will outline the potential of context-aware content-centric caching at network edge equipment and at user devices.
- A proof of concept will be exhibited though a federated testbed located in France, Switzerland and in the UK.
Overall, MACACO will introduce an original framework that is disruptive with respect to solutions currently proposed to off-load the access network infrastructure, and yet is more practical than the latter. The realization of such a framework implies addressing a number of interesting scientific challenges that, once solved, enable a real-world evaluation of the architecture.
