Exploring the potential in practice for opportunistic networks amongst smart mobile devices
Shu Liu, Aaron Striegel · 2013
Wireless network providers are under tremendous pressure to deliver unprecedented amounts of data to a variety of mobile devices. A powerful concept that has only gained limited traction in practice has been the concept of opportunistic networks whereby nodes opportunistically communicate with each other when in range to augment or overcome existing wireless systems. One of the key impediments towards the adoption of opportunistic communications has been the inability to demonstrate viability at scale, namely showing that sufficient opportunities exist and more importantly exist when needed to offer significant network performance gains. We demonstrate through a large-scale, longitudinal study of smartphone users that significant opportunities are indeed prevalent, are indeed stable, and end up being reasonably reciprocal both on short and long-term timescales. In this paper, we propose a framework dubbed PSR (Prevalence, Stability, Reciprocity) to capture key aspects that characterize the net potential for opportunistic networks which we feel merit significantly increased attention.