Mobile Data Traffic Offloading through Opportunistic Vehicular Communications

Abstract

To cope with an exponentially increasing demand on mobile data traffic in cellular network, proximity-based opportunistic vehicular communications can be exploited as a complementary mean to offload and reduce the load of cellular network. In this paper, we propose a two-phase approach for mobile data traffic offloading, which exploits opportunistic contact and future utility with user mobility. The proposed approach includes one phase of initial source selection and subsequent phase of data forwarding. In phase 1, we build a weighted reachability graph, which is a very useful high-level abstraction for studying vehicular communication over time. Then, we propose an initial source selection algorithm, named VRank, and apply it in the weight reachability graph to identify some influential vehicles to serve as initial sources according to the rank of VRank. In phase 2, we formulate the forwarding schedule problem as a global utility maximization problem, which takes heterogeneous user interest and future utility contribution into consideration. Then, we propose an efficient scheme MGUP to solve the problem by providing a solution that decides which object should be broadcast. The effectiveness of our algorithm is verified through extensive simulation using real vehicular trace.