Efficient distribution of large files in UMTS supported by network coded M2M data transfer with multiple generations

Abstract

This paper is a sequel of previous work, in which we have studied the traffic management problem in UMTS. The main objective was to improve the spectral efficiency of cellular networks by employing network coding supported direct mobile-tomobile communication on usually underloaded uplink channels for the distribution of a delay insensitive popular content in multicast manner. Simulations demonstrate the noticeable performance enhancement in terms of file download times and at the same time a substantial reduction of the number of necessary transmissions in both uplink and downlink directions. However, popular content is often too large to be processed with a straightforward realization of network coding; combining the entire file to construct a single encoded block is impractical due to high encoding and decoding costs. To circumvent this problem, a novel concept is proposed in this paper. The scheme is based on processing popular content of virtually arbitrary size by embedding multiple generations into network coding. © 2010 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social-Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.