Today, the media content delivery in intermittent connected networks has become increasingly critical. This paper studies content exchange among mobile commuters in urban transport systems. Our work is inspired by two facts: (1) the commuters in urban transport systems tend to take regular routes to the same place every weekday and their paths exhibit a high degree of temporal and spatial regularities; (2) the rapid development of broadband wireless technologies such as IEEE 802.11n makes fast data transfer possible. We first propose a new disconnection-tolerant network infrastructure, which reinforces the connectivity of intermittent connected mobile commuters and uses store-and-forward routers to increase their encounter opportunity, and in turn achieves efficient media content delivery among them. Then a router-centric prediction method is designed to collect passengers' historical path information to determine the best delivery scheme. We evaluate the feasibility and the performance of the proposed infrastructure as well as the delivery scheme, using real data set from an urban transport system. The simulation results demonstrate the proposed system is highly practical in terms of the memory usage of routers and the maximum achievable data transfer rate.
['Wei Wei', 'Chen Wang', 'Hongzhi Lin', 'Rui Zhang', 'Hongbo Jiang']
A novel networking architecture for mobile content delivery in urban transport systems