Using Multiple Transport Networks in NetInf Enabled Android Devices

Abstract: In recent years, there has been a significant increase of mobile devices usage (e.g. phones, tablets), consequently the demand of network capacity is higher than ever before. In large crowd events (such as football matches, concerts, accidents, etc), current content distribution is done in a host-centric manner where users have to retrieve content from external servers using the 3G-Uplink. This result in problems like Up-link congestion when there is an unexpected boost in data traffic. The prototype developed within this master thesis project, implements a new control layer in mobile devices, which can be used in events with large crowds as an alternative solution for optimizing content distribution. The usage of this solution decreases the amount of data sent over the 3G-uplink to retrieve similar contents, since they can be obtained from nearby peers using short range transport technologies. The alternative solution is based on information-centric networking paradigm. Using this approach in Large Crowd events, popular content could be cached in users’ devices creating new sources of content within the crowd. Afterwards, these copies could be shared between users using P2P-like communication over short range transport technologies available in nowadays’ mobile devices. In this new content distribution scheme, the more popular the content gets the more chances it could be retrieved from a cached copy within the crowd and, this could lead to a less amount of data transferred over the 3G uplink