Relay-based multipoint content delivery for wireless users in an information-centric network

Information-Centric Networking (ICN) reconsiders the host-centric Internet paradigm with a view to information or content-based identifiers and where multicast data delivery is the norm. However, Wi-Fi, the predominant means of local wireless connectivity today, but also 3G and 4G technologies, are known to suffer from poor multicast performance. In this work, we consider exploiting content awareness, which is inherent in ICN architectures, to improve wireless multicast delivery by means of relaying. In particular, given that different types of content have different performance requirements, we provide a multi-objective optimization formulation for the problem of activating appropriate subsets of users as relays and deciding on their transmission rates, optimizing for different criteria, such as reliability, performance, and energy cost on a per-content item basis. Based on that, we propose a heuristic algorithm to select relay-rate assignments, showing it to outperform standard wireless multicast transmission strategies and also to be feasible to operate on top of resource-constrained off-the-shelf wireless equipment. Finally, we demonstrate how our scheme could be utilized for multicasting scalable video with improved Quality of Experience.