Telco asks transp: Can you give me a ride in the era of big data?
Rashmi Munjal, William Liu, Xue Jun Li, Jairo Gutiérrez, Peter Han Joo Chong · 2017
The advancements of Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have contributed to an explosive growth of high-volume, high-velocity and high-variety information assets, and the era of Big Data has emerged. The infrastructure-based networks are becoming increasingly overloaded, while the cost of maintaining and expanding the infrastructure to accommodate the Big Data communications remains high. In addition, the use of these networks keeps increasing energy demand and consumptions. As a result, the carbon emission during this process could finally end up seriously harming the environment. Our approach consists of offloading delay-tolerant data from the wired and wireless networks towards the existing public transport infrastructure, including buses, trams, trains, and aeroplanes by exploring their optimal temporal-spatial resource efficiency. The two numerical studies reported in this paper confirm the significant energy and cost savings available by utilizing the scheduled public transport networks for data dissemination while still guaranteeing data delivery.