Mobility-Aware Cooperative Content Caching in Social Wireless Networks

This paper presents a conceptual framework of mobility-aware cooperative caching for minimizing electronic content provisioning cost in Mobile Social Wireless Networks (MSWNET). The MSWNETs are formed by wireless mobile devices sharing common interests in electronic content, and physically gathering in various public settings such as University campuses, work places, malls, and airports. Cooperative caching in such MSWNETs are shown to be able to reduce the content provisioning cost which depends heavily on the service and pricing dependencies among various stakeholders including the content provider, the network service provider, and the end consumers. This paper first develops practical network, search, and pricing models which are then used for creating an optimal cooperative caching strategy for static networks. In addition to proving its optimality for the static case, the paper constructs analytical models, simulation, and prototype experiments for evaluating the performance of the proposed strategy. Building on the static case, the paper then develops a mobility analysis technique and demonstrates the applicability of the proposed scheme in the presence of user mobility.