Content Retrieval At the Edge: A Social-aware and Named Data Cooperative Framework

Recent years with the popularity of mobile devices have witnessed an explosive growth of mobile multimedia contents which dominate more than 50% of mobile data traffic. This significant growth poses a severe challenge for future cellular networks. As a promising approach to overcome the challenge, we advocate Content Retrieval At the Edge, a content-centric cooperative service paradigm via device-to-device (D2D) communications to reduce cellular traffic volume in mobile networks. By leveraging the Named Data Networking (NDN) principle, we propose sNDN, a social-aware named data framework to achieve efficient cooperative content retrieval. Specifically, sNDN introduces Friendship Circle by grouping a user with her close friends of both high mobility similarity and high content similarity. We construct NDN routing tables conditioned on Friendship Circle encounter frequency to navigate a content request and a content reply packet between Friendship Circles, and leverage social properties in Friendship Circle to search for the final target as inner-Friendship Circle routing. The evaluation results demonstrate that sNDN can save cellular capacity greatly and outperform other content retrieval schemes significantly.