The Akamai network: a platform for high-performance internet applications
ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review
To Cache or Not to Cache: The 3G Case
IEEE Internet Computing
TailGate: handling long-tail content with a little help from friends
Proceedings of the 21st international conference on World Wide Web
Web caching on smartphones: ideal vs. reality
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services
The case for psychological computing
Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Mobile Computing Systems and Applications
Staying online while mobile: the hidden costs
Proceedings of the ninth ACM conference on Emerging networking experiments and technologies
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Content caching is a fundamental building block of the Internet. Caches are widely deployed at network edges to improve performance for end-users, and to reduce load on web servers and the backbone network. Considering mobile 3G/4G networks, however, the bottleneck is at the access link, where bandwidth is shared among all mobile terminals. As such, per-user capacity cannot grow to cope with the traffic demand. Unfortunately, caching policies would not reduce the load on the wireless link which would have to carry multiple copies of the same object that is being downloaded by multiple mobile terminals sharing the same access link. In this paper we investigate if it is worth to push the caching paradigm even farther. We hypothesize a system in which mobile terminals implement a local cache, where popular content can be pushed/pre-staged. This exploits the peculiar broadcast capability of the wireless channels to replicate content "for free" on all terminals, saving the cost of transmitting multiple copies of those popular objects. Relying on a large data set collected from a European mobile carrier, we analyse the content popularity characteristics of mobile traffic, and quantify the benefit that the push-to-mobile system would produce. We found that content pre-staging, by proactively and periodically broadcasting "bundles" of popular objects to devices, allows to both greatly i) improve users' performance and ii) reduce up to 20% (40%) the downloaded volume (number of requests) in optimistic scenarios with a bundle of 100 MB. However, some technical constraints and content characteristics could question the actual gain such system would reach in practice.