Content Dissemination by Pushing and Sharing in Mobile Cellular Networks: An Analytical Study

Abstract—The ever increasing traffic demand is a serious concern of mobile network operators, and the conventional pull-based (or request-based) communication model may not be able to handle this data explosion problem. To reduce the traffic load on cellular links for disseminating content, we propose to push the content to a subset of subscribers via cellular links, and to allow the subscribers to share the content via opportunistic local connectivity (i.e. Wi-Fi ad-hoc mode). We theoretically model and analyze how the content can be disseminated by both pushing via cellular links and sharing via Wi-Fi links, where handovers are modeled based on the multi-compartment model. We also formulate a mathematical framework to optimize the content dissemination, by which the trade-off between the dissemination delay and the energy cost is explored. I