Taming the Mobile Data Deluge With Drop Zones

—Human communication has changed by the advent of smartphones. Using commonplace mobile device features they started uploading large amounts of content that increases. This increase in demand will overwhelm capacity and limits the providers’ ability to provide the quality of service demanded by their users. In the absence of technical solutions, cellular network providers are considering changing billing plans to address this. Our contributions are twofold. First, by analyzing user content upload behavior, we find that the user-generated content problem is a user-behavioral problem. Particularly, by analyzing user mobility and data logs of 2 million users of one of the largest US cellular providers we find that (i) users upload content from a small number of locations; (ii) because such locations are different for users, we find that the problem appears ubiquitous. However, we find that (iii) there exists a significant lag between content generation and uploading times, and (i...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: TON
• Authors: Ionut Trestian, Supranamaya Ranjan, Aleksandar Kuzmanovic, Antonio Nucci
• Keywords: Capacity Upgrades, Design Infrastructure, Placement Algorithms, Programming Languages, TON 2012