Prospects and challenges of context-aware multimedia content delivery in cooperative satellite and terrestrial networks

Cooperative satellite cells and terrestrial wireless communication networks (comprising macrocells, picocells, and the Internet) are much anticipated access technologies to enable users to seamlessly access rich multimedia content (e.g., TV broadcasting, VoD streaming, and other services) on their devices. Furthermore, context awareness has become popular to accompany these services not only to enhance the users´ perceived service quality but also to improve the overall utilization of such cooperative networks. However, delivering context-aware multimedia content through these cooperative networks is associated with a significant research challenge due to the inherently different satellites and terrestrial networks technologies. For example, to provide context-specific TV programs to a user, a satellite needs to adopt unicast-style delivery. This may be an expensive operation since satellites are intrinsically useful for broadcasting or multicasting services to a wide audience. In contrast, terrestrial communication networks can be better suited to perform unicast-based context-aware content delivery. In this article, we address these challenges, and propose a dynamic bandwidth allocation method to effectively utilize the satellite and terrestrial networks for providing context-aware contents to many users. Computer-based simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method.