Increasing Network Resiliency Via Data-Centric Offloading

Mobile traffic volume is increasing rapidly, pressuring the underlying infrastructure to quickly increase its capacity. New applications are further exacerbating this problem. Device to-Device communication has been long recognized as a means to offload traffic from the infrastructure; however, the host oriented model of the TCP/IP-based Internet poses challenges to this communication pattern. This paper addresses these issues by proposing a scheme that uses a data-centric model to fetch contents from nearby peers while increasing the resiliency of the network in cases of outages and disasters. We collected real data from social media to create a content request pattern and evaluate our approach through the simulation of realistic urban scenarios. Additionally, we analyze the scenario of large crowds in sports venues. Our simulation results show that we can offload traffic from the backhaul network by up to 51.7%, suggesting an advantageous path to support the surge in traffic while keeping complexity and cost for the network operator at manageable levels.