Premium
Disruption tolerant networking by Smart Caching
Author(s) -
Goebbels Stephan
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
international journal of communication systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1099-1131
pISSN - 1074-5351
DOI - 10.1002/dac.1088
Subject(s) - computer science , computer network , radio access network , core network , mobile broadband , umts terrestrial radio access network , broadband , umts frequency bands , quality of service , broadband networks , cellular network , provisioning , access network , wireless broadband , wireless network , telecommunications , wireless , base station , mobile station
Future mobile radio networks will aim at achieving ‘broadband access for all’, anywhere. The performance of a radio network vitally depends on the characteristics of the transmission path between the user terminal and the access point and the degree of network coverage. In urban areas, full broadband radio coverage is difficult to provide, causing a high variation in the link quality and making broadband services hard to realize. In rural regions, massive deployment costs prevent a full broadband coverage. Most of the time users have to settle for UMTS‐like wide area networks. For mobile users accessing services, such as video streaming, which require continuous broadband connectivity, it virtually results in intermittent network connectivity. The frequent disruption of the broadband link and its replacement with no or only low‐performance connections is a problem that should be addressed. This article introduces a new technique called Smart Caching (SC), which is able to mitigate variations in the network performance so that non‐real‐time and non‐interactive services' quality is substantially improved. SC supports pre‐fetching from a server and buffering data at the edge of the core network, in the so‐called Smart Cache. It transmits data with extremely high speed to be buffered in the mobile terminal when it is in the service range of an access point. This allows for the provisioning of data‐intensive services even in the case of patchy wireless broadband network coverage and intermittent connectivity. The performance of the SC service is evaluated with two different sophisticated queuing models, both based on the Markov arrival process. The benefit of the new technique is discussed and dimensioning issues are outlined. Furthermore, a comparison with legacy network setups is given. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.