Challenges in Mobile Content Delivery in MSNs
How to Control a Huge Amount of Content Requests? In MSNs, users cannot only produce their own content, but also request content from others. For example, a
Fig. 6.1 Mobile content delivery in 5G
mobile user may update and publish his own content frequently, and can also subscribe to other people’s content according to his interests and social ties. Compared with conventional networks, the amount of content requests in MSNs is not of the same order of magnitude. In particular, most requests are sent according to the interests of users. Since there is an obvious relationship based on interests among content, users, and communities, the requests should be controlled with a consideration of interests.
How to Control a Large Number of Replicas of Content? When a user publishes his own content, this content may be subscribed to by other users and then stored on different sites. Therefore, for the same content there will be a large number of its replicas, which incurs a high operating cost to manage these replicas. For example, when the producer of original content wants to update this content or publish some related information to this content, it is hard to recognize which replicas of his content are on which sites. Furthermore, due to mobility, it becomes even harder to control these replicas. Different from the conventional way of controlling replicas based on the location specified by an IP address, a new approach is required to manage replicas based on their own identity, e.g, its ID or name.
How to Control Load Balance? Compared with wired networks, both macro cells and small cells have their own limited capacities to deliver content. With the increase in the amount of content and the population of users, it is expected that network traffic can be distributed. Instead of forwarding all of the requests to the site that stores the original content, some content can be cached and placed within the small cell by different strategies to provide content with a possible load balance.
