An Efficient Content Delivery Infrastructure Leveraging the Public Transportation Network

With the world population becoming increasingly urban and the multiplication of mega cities, urban leaders have responded with plans calling for so called smart cities relying on instantaneous access to information using mobile devices for an intelligent management of resources. Coupled with the advent of the smartphone as the main platform for accessing the Internet, this has created the conditions for the looming wireless bandwidth crunch. This paper presents a content delivery infrastructure relying on off-the-shelf technology and the public transportation network (PTN) aimed at relieving the wireless bandwidth crunch in urban centers. Our solution proposes installing WiFi access points on selected public bus stations and buses and using the latter as data mules, creating a delay tolerant network capable of carrying content users can access while using the public transportation. Building such an infrastructure poses several challenges, including congestion points in major hubs and the cost of additional hardware necessary for secure communications. To address these challenges we propose a 3-Tier architecture that guarantees end-to-end delivery and minimizes hardware cost. Trace-based simulations from three major European cities of Paris, Helsinki and Toulouse demonstrate the viability of our design choices. In particular, the 3-Tier architecture is shown to guarantee end-to-end connectivity and reduce the deployment cost by several times while delivering at least as many packets as a baseline architecture.