Content Centricity in Constrained Cellular-Assisted D2D Communications

Abstract : The huge increase of mobile traffic in the latest years has put cellular networks under pressure. To face this situation, operators propose to adopt data offloading techniques based on device-to-device communications to alleviate their infrastructure. In this paper, we consider a specific scenario in which the cellular channel has severe capacity limitations. Existing offloading techniques focus on the underlying communication mechanisms and fail to properly manage the interest users have in content. The straightforward approach to tackle this issue is to rely on the content-centric networking (CCN) paradigm. Nevertheless, the hybrid nature of our scenario makes this vision challenging—what should circulate through the cellular channel and what should remain within the opportunistic network? In this paper, we investigate our target scenario and identify a number of challenges therein. We finally define a high-level architecture that we intend to instantiate in the case of a public infrastructure scenario.