A novel paradigm for context-aware content pre-fetching in mobile networks

The current content provision methods and associated pricing and business models are challenged by the traffic requirements anticipated for future “data intensive” services. In order to deliver substantially higher peak rates operators will need to deploy a much denser infrastructure and/or acquire more spectrum, thus significantly increasing their CAPEX and OPEX and reducing revenues. To improve the utilization of available network resources this paper presents ActiveCast, a disruptive content delivery paradigm that supports opportunistic content pre-fetching by introducing semantic and context awareness in the currently “agnostic” networking paradigm. The experimental investigations presented in the paper focus on mobile video provision and a content provider, integrated with Facebook and YouTube, has been developed and used to identify socially relevant content for a set of test users. Part of the studies presented in the paper aim at experimentally understanding the structure of the energy costs associated with pre-fetching and on defining a delivery strategy that allows controlling the amount of energy invested. A comparison between a centralized implementation, in which pre-fetching is coordinated by the mobile operators, and an Over-The-Top (OTT) implementation of ActiveCast are also presented. The results show that complementing the context information available at individual user terminals with traffic information, shared by mobile operators through the ActiveCast API, can substantially reduce the energy costs of content delivery, as compared with “on demand” video streaming. Additionally, opportunistically exploiting connections with WiFi APs can amplify the gains already achievable by prefetching on wide area networks.