Mobile Data Delivery through Opportunistic Communications among Cellular Users: A Case Study for the D4D Challenge∗

The appearance of smartphones and increasing popularity of various mobile applications and services have caused the explosion of mobile data traffic. To avoid overloading the cellular networks, different offloading solutions (such as WiFi networks or femtocells) have been proposed and adopted. Recently, offloading cellular traffic through opportunistic communications among mobile phones becomes a new and promising option, due to free cost. In this paper, by using real trace data from the Orange “Data for Development” (D4D) challenge, we investigate the feasibility of delivering data packets among mobile cellular users through opportunistic communications in a large scale network. Our experimental results show that by using social or location properties of mobile users opportunistic routing can indeed complement the traditional cellular network to deliver delay-tolerant data packets among certain portion of cellular users. Such solution is especially cost efficient and beneficial for developing countries, as Ivory Coast.