Section: Application Domains

Mobile wireless network

Smart portable devices such as smartphones, PDAs or tablet PCs are being considered as pervasive mobile sensing platforms due to their increasing proliferation and their wide range of embedded heterogeneous capabilities (in terms of type of communication and data gathering possibilities - e.g., 3G, WiFi, GPS, video, camera, etc). Such devices are changing the way people are communicating, generating, and exchanging data: They allow the free sensing/gathering of data of the surrounding environment anytime and anywhere. On the other hand, the projected increase of mobile data traffic demand pushes towards additional complementary offloading methods. Novel mechanisms are thus needed, which must fit both the new context that Internet users experience now, and their forecasted demands.

In these contexts, the application domains that we are targeting are related to traffic offloading in large-scale mobile wireless networks. Among the numerous offloading solutions fitting in this application domain, we are specially interested in the ones related to: infrastructure deployment, traffic modeling, opportunistic communication, or still task delegation. A core principle of such solutions is the understanding and modeling of users behavior in terms of their context (i.e., imposed by mobility) and their content demands.