China Communications

June 2013 47

MOBILE INTERNET


CACTSE: Cloudlet Aided Cooperative Terminals
Service Environment for Mobile Proximity
Content Delivery

WANG Qing, HU Zheng*, WANG Ming, LIU Haifeng
Key Laboratory of Universal Wireless Communications, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Ministry of Education,
Beijing 100876, China

Abstract: Along with the rapid development of
communications, the Internet, and smart termi-
nals, mobile Internet has become a hot topic
with both opportunities and challenges. In this
article, a new perspective on edge content de-
livery service for mobile Internet is described,
based on cooperating terminals. A mobile cloud
architecture named Cloudlet Aided Coopera-
tive Terminals Service Environment (CACTSE)
is proposed as an edge network service envi-
ronment. The Service Manager (SM), a cloudlet
like module, is introduced into the local service
domain in order to manage the in-domain ter-
minals and help coordinate the content delivery
requests for better bandwidth efficiency as well
as user experience. The reference model is pre-
sented in this article with architecture and
mechanism design. Moreover, the research
progress and potential technology trends of
CACTSE are analysed based on the related
R&D directions.
Key words: mobile Internet; edge service; mo-
bile content delivery; mobile cloud architecture
I. INTRODUCTION
The continuing evolution of the Internet, mo-
bile telecommunication and smart terminals is
giving birth to a new architecture of network
service mobile Internet [1]. Not just a sim-
ple extension of the Internet, the mobile
Internet, instead lays more emphasis on ser-
vice provisioning and the user experience. As
mobile Internet has begun to attract more and
more attention in recent years, instead of tra-
ditional online sites, many widely popular
mobile software and applications are devoted
to mobile Internet, e.g., iOS for iPhone, Twitter,
Weibo of Sina, Instagram, and Weixin of Ten-
cent. At the same time, mobile devices have
been evolving dramatically, becoming an
essential part of human life. The mobile de-
vices now are capable not only of faster proc-
essing, storage, screen display, and sensing,
but also of communications and human inter-
actions. For example, the heterogeneous wire-
less communication capabilities of mobile
terminals usually include technologies such as
3G, 4G, WiFi and Bluetooth. Integration of
versatile sensors for mobile devices helps mo-
bile Internet applications to understand the
users physical environment more accurately,
promoting abundant opportunities for service
innovation [2], including services related to
mobile content delivery.
Based on the development of both smart
terminals and the mobile Internet, users are
provided with rich experiences of various
kinds of services in forms of mobile applica-
tions (such as Apple Apps and Android Apps).
Among these plentiful services is the most
basic and widely used element service named

Received: 2013-03-10
Revised: 2013-05-13
Editor: ZHANG Ping



48 China Communications

June 2013
content delivery service whether for ap-
plication updates or user requested contents.
The demand for video service is still
booming in mobile environments. According
to Ciscos VNI mobile report, global mobile
data traffic will multiply 13-fold between
2012 and 2017[3]. However, mobile devices
are still intrinsically limited by communication,
computing, storage and power compared with
their tethered counterparts. One typical con-
straint is the traditional central-architecture with
limited wireless access bandwidth. To solve this
problem, we can perhaps keep the old paradigm.
But, alternatively, considering the cooperation
of devices or Device to Device (D2D) at the
edge of mobile networks, we need a new ser-
vice architecture to better unleash the full po-
tential of wireless networks, in ways both
feasible and future-oriented.
By means of cooperation, terminals are in-
teroperable via short range wireless connec-
tions, and the single terminals capabilities can
be expanded with regard to bandwidth, com-
puting, storage or even contents. Nowadays,
the terminals can simultaneously access
cellular networks, WiFi, and Bluetooth net-
works for near field communication. For ex-
ample, one terminal can share a picture
through Bluetooth connection with near field
terminals while it communicates via the cellu-
lar networks. The X-direct technologies such
as WiFi Direct[4] and LTE Direct[5] pave the
way for D2D communication with the poten-
tial coordination of mobile cellular networks.
However, little synergy exists between these
advanced technologies and mobile Internet
services. Many mobile terminal cooperative
services remain at the research and trial level
without significant commercialization.
There are two typical features for the de-
tails of the users and contents for mobile
Internet. The first one is asynchrony, which
means the required contents can be downloaded
and consumed at different times without
requiring synchronization; this can be
considered delay tolerance. The second one
is that the total content traffic is huge but
shows typical statistical characteristics of
clustering based on the locations and relation-
ships of users. For example, Location Based
Service (LBS) is analysed to enable better
service because different people who visit the
same place are likely to enjoy highly corre-
lated characteristics, and the contents they
share may have very close relationships[6].
The first law of geography [7] according to
Waldo Tobler (1970) states that Everything is
related to everything else, but near things are
more related than distant things. Delay toler-
ance, on the other hand, enables the terminals
to avoid the peak of network traffic, and clus-
tering makes it possible to share contents be-
tween the terminals within a domain which
can be a community or just proximity.
The above trends show how cooperation
within a local domain of edge network can and
will leverage the demands of mobile Internet
nowadays. Indeed, many researchers have
seen this trend, and some pioneering works
have been done. Ref. [8] summarized the radio
technologies enabling mobile Internet and
pointed out that more research on service ar-
chitecture was still in great need. The concept
of Edge Service (ES) [9], which was proposed
for local domain cooperation, has been a topic
with rich research history. Shaping ES, a lot of
architectures and different demos were pro-
posed. Moreover, standardization work for the
basic elements of an ES (like Open Pluggable
Edge Services [10]) had also been carried out.
In contrast to the backbone network, standards
mainly focused on the edge network service
architecture which highlighted the cooperation
of edge network users. Analogous ideas can be
found in other research for Personal Environ-
ment Service (PES) [11], which proposed a
location based mobility service architecture
for environment mobility. Refs. [12-13] used
ideas from cloud computing [14] to form the
so-called mobile cloud computing architecture
to enhance the computing and memory capa-
bilities of a single mobile terminal for com-


An edge service frame-
work entitled Cloudlet
Aided Cooperative Ter-
minals Service Environ-
ment (CACTSE) is int-
roduced in which a ser-
vice manager is
provided as a control
plane entity to coope-
rate with the terminals.
The recommended
design architecture, me-
chanism and applica-
tions are detailed tog-
ether with technology
trends, namely network
performance, user &
contents, and service
architecture progress.




China Communications

June 2013 49

puting intensive tasks (e.g., speech recognition,
natural language processing, computer vision
and graphics, machine learning, augmented
reality, and planning and decision making) by
passing the tasks to a backend mobile cloud.
However, the mobile cloud emerges in differ-
ent forms: a group of local mobile terminals
like Misco [15], in which a vision of MapRe-
duce can be handled by a server farm com-
posed of over 20 Nokia N95 smartphones; or a
server farm of a lot of local high-performance
computers; or it can even be a Virtual Machine
(VM) mapping named cloudlet [16]. Cloudlet
is a trusted, rich-resource computer or cluster
of computers that is well-connected to the
Internet and available for use by nearby mo-
bile devices. When most of the mobile clouds
are trying to aggregate the computing and
storage resources, in [17] mobile cloud is
proposed the coming basis for content deliv-
ery service. This paper introduces novel
technologies such as network coding in com-
bination with social networks in order to
boost cooperation among users as well as
connect people over the shared content.
Though plenty of research efforts have been
ongoing and some achievements have been
reached, there is much more work to do.
Based on the studies above, a mobile cloud
computing architecture for content delivery
among cooperative terminal service environ-
ment at the edge of mobile Internet is pro-
posed in this article. We call it Cloudlet
Aided Cooperative Terminals Service Envi-
ronment (CACTSE). The requirements, ar-
chitecture and functional modules of multi-
terminal cooperation service system for mo-
bile Internet are introduced. Moreover, the pro-
tocols and control technologies together with
challenges and potential technology trends are
investigated.
The rest of this paper is organised as fol-
lows. Section II introduces the cases of mobile
content delivery service, followed by the
CASTCSE architecture, mechanisms and ap-
plications. Progress and trending technologies
are depicted in Section III. Section IV summa-
rises the article.
II. CLOUDLET AIDED COOPERATIVE
TERMINALS SERVICE ENVIRONMENT
The need for mobile content delivery services
far exceeds network capability, especially
when video traffic dominates [3]. Dealing
with this booming demand is a key problem of
the mobile Internet. In this section, the
CACTSE architecture is detailed. There are
three design principles in CACTSE: coopera-
tion by edge terminals, sensing, and clustering.
First, CACTSE is an ES architecture, so ter-
minal cooperation is located at the edge net-
works. Furthermore, sensing and contexts will
contribute to a huge database on which smart
algorithms can be deployed for service inno-
vations. Finally, clustering of users and con-
tents shows some statistical characteristics and
such relationships can be used to further im-
prove content delivery performance. CACTSE
can provide enhancements to services that
already exist as well as future innovations, e.g.,
cloud storage, mobile multimedia services,
mobile data processing. Mobile content deliv-
ery is taken as an example service to demon-
strate this kind of new architecture. Content
Delivery Network (CDN) [18] is a very
widely applied network, in which contents
are copied to an edge server to decrease the
WAN delay while at the same time, bringing
the contents closer to the users. In this article,
CACTSE is introduced to push the contents
much more close to the users so that
cooperation is possible, while not disrupting
the existing CDN.
In the mobile Internet scenarios of content
delivery, the user may roam around. However,
when consuming content, users tend to be in a
certain domain which can be controlled by
some kind of coordinator, such as a cellular or
WiFi AP. Moreover, users within this domain
often share the same interests (for example, in
school and large offices). Take the students in



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Fig.1 The CACTSE system

class as an example. A classroom can serve as
a local domain, and students take mobile ter-
minals with them. When in class, most of
them need to share the slide files of the
teacher which may be stored in the cloud
server. There will be chances of cooperation in
such situations, because users within a same
region (or local domain) tend to request the
same contents. In a traditional content delivery
network, these requests will cause a surge of
network traffic or even congestion. A particu-
lar user may have many terminals, each with
specific usage; at the same time many users
may work together or need the same contents.
For example, when at a party, you may share
some interesting video clips with friends; soon
all of your friends may make requests for
those videos. If the videos are not in your edge
content server, there will be a waste of band-
width to transmit the same content many times.
But if, within the local domain, there is a
coordinator for all the terminals, managing the
locally cached contents, it will search the local
content table (which lists the contents cached
within the terminals). If the contents are found,
a local D2D sharing will be performed, and if
not, a multi-terminal cooperation for down-
loading contents can begin.
Adding mobile terminals will create more
edge networks, expanding the demand on the
local domain coordinator, so a Service Man-
ager (SM) is introduced to coordinate the ESs.
The SM, not needing large storage and ad-
vanced computing capability, does not have to
be a powerful computer or router. Instead, it is
a control plane entity, and can even be built on
a local virtual machine. The architecture and
mechanism of this new service system will be
presented in the following sections.
2.1 Architecture
Typically, in the CACTSE system, each ter-
minal has at least two means of wireless ac-
cess (for example 3G and WiFi), but only the
3G radio can access the Internet. A WiFi
local network can be established, and each
terminal has its own memory to store some
contents. Energy consumption is also consid-
ered. For example, it was reported in a meas-
urement study[19] that in order to download
10 KB data, WiFi consumes one-sixth of 3Gs
energy and one-third of GSMs energy. This
means WiFi is a good choice for local D2D
communication with considerable bandwidth
and energy savings. In mobile content delivery
scenarios, all the mobile individuals will be
grouped into a local domain based on geo-
graphical location. From that point of view, all
the terminals are in the same domain for a
relatively long time before leaving the local
network. For example, people on a bus can be
organized in a temporary local network. The
CACTSE system is shown in Figure 1. The
Internet is the main content source, and CDN
technology is applied, whose end is the edge
content server. Cellular network is the main
Internet access for most of the mobile termi-
nals, but WLAN is often preferred because of
its low cost. SM is placed at the edge network
closer to the user than the CDN edge. So there
may be many SMs connected to the same
CDN edge. A mobile terminal has its own cel-
lular access network, and at the same time, it
is registered to SM through WLAN.



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SM takes charge of coordinating the local
network, and it has two entities: Service Coor-
dinator (SC) and Local Content Cache (LCC).
SM itself does not need to have access to the
Internet. SC primarily maintains the network
connection and manages the users and their
terminals. It can also work as a coordinator of
multiple terminals. If someone wants to edit
documents on a laptop while reading on an-
other tablet and show documents to friends
with a third computer, SC will play a crucial
role in managing the network content flow.
LCC is also of great importance in content
distribution. It caches all the local content lists
(not the contents which are cached in termi-
nals), and each entry from the list records the
unique content name and location, which may
like Content Centric Network (CCN) [20], in
which the network is organized based on the
contents instead of IP addresses. In fact, it is a
local content database index. In this database,
contents are specified by their names, so it is of
critical importance that the naming of a file or
content should have a globally accepted stan-
dard so as to greatly improve the efficiency of
communication. Figure 2 shows the detailed
architecture of CACTSE.
In Figure 2, the mobile terminals register in
their respective networks and at the same time
register to SM. SM may be able to access the
Internet for contents, but when it fails to con-
nect to the Internet, it still functions. Instead,
after SM identifies content parts missing in the
local domain, it will coordinate the terminals
which have Internet access to split the original
request and then collect the downloaded con-
tents. In the worst case, if all the terminals and
SM fail to access the Internet, it serves as a
completely local content sharing system.
All the terminals should register to SC first,
and then the terminals upload the content lists
to LCC. SC and LCC are synchronized with
terminals by a heartbeat signal to check whe-
ther the terminal is online. It is of great impor-
tance to make sure that a certain terminal is
within the SMs service region. If SC notices


Fig.2 Architecture of CACTSE

the absence of a terminal, it will inform the
LCC to hide the corresponding content list
until the next time the terminal join the net-
work. When a terminal disappears for a long
time and new requests for LCC storage came,
that terminals old entries will be deleted to
make room for other users.
The Context Server (CS) is a server which
stores basic network information, including
terminal capabilities, for example CPU, GPU,
storage, network capability and user history
traces. At the same time, it also serves as a
database of sensing information for a data
mining module (which will be introduced later)
of the Expanded Function Modules (EFMs).
For example, history traces can be used to
make predictions. By analysing the records of
the users behaviours on mobile Internet, SM
can load Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms
to forecast the kind of contents users may need
in the future and then push the corresponding
contents to the edge network storage at a suit-
able time. This provides a obtain without ob-
taining feature, similar to search without
searching in next generation search engines.
In Figure 2, the orange dashed box below
the SM rectangle contains the expanded func-
tion modules, where enhanced technologies



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Fig.3 Mechanisms of CACTSE

like data mining, social computing and digital
rights may be situated to improve the user ex-
perience of CACTSE.
Data mining [21-22] is a new hot topic,
which will lead to a new revolution in human
society. Computing and memory technologies
enable people to remember much more
fine-grained information about the world and
about other people. With numerous kinds of
sensors, a large amount of data can be gener-
ated. At the same time, cognitive surplus[23]
and mobile Internet highlight the new trend of
user generated contents (UGC)[24] which
combines the content generator and content
consumer. Sensor data and UGC will build up
a huge amount of data to be analysed. Data
mining is quite appropriate to abstract knowl-
edge from such data. Some AI algorithms can
be used to improve the performance for proc-
essing such a huge amount of data. However,
all of these tasks are too heavy for mobile de-
vices. With the help of SM, cooperation can
best leverage the existing resources.
Social computing[25] is proliferating in so-
cial network sites (SNS), and offers a bright
future for content services. The relationship of
people in SNS reflects their relationship in the
real world, and thus ultimately impacts contents
sharing between them. Edge domains exhibit
similar phenomena.
Digital Rights Management (DRM) is used
to regulate the rights to the contents. In other
words, DRM is a kind of content security lock
to guarantee the right contents for the licensed
users and avoid content distribution without
copyright protection. DRM may depend on
local law. With the help of EFM, mobile
content distribution can be more cus-
tomer-oriented and smart.
In the blue dashed box, the SMs can work
together to provide a bigger content pool like a
content cloud. In the domain of local terminals,
the last step is to transport their contents
where needed in using P2P communications.
2.2 Mechanism
The overall workflow of CACTSE can be di-
vided into 4 steps: content discovery, content
request, content coordination and transmission
control. Figure 3 demonstrates the typical
mechanism of CACTSE.
In content discovery phase, terminals reg-
ister in the CACTSE system, and upload a list
of content indexes they agree to share to LCC.
There is also a keep-alive signal to inform SM
that the terminals are still within range. In the
content request phase, if one terminal requests
certain contents, that request will be sent to
SM so that in the content cooperation phase,
SM will search LCC and history traces on the
context server. When the contents are stored in
some other terminals within the domain, SM
will redirect the request to the terminals which
store the contents. At last in the transmission
control phase, the contents will be transmitted
using P2P communications. On the other hand,
if the required contents are not cached locally,
SM will redirect the request to the Internet if
possible. Take the example of Figure 3, in
which all of the terminals within SM domain
have been registered in the SC of SM (the
pink directed line) and the content lists have
been stored in LCC. All the traces of network
behaviour were recorded in the CS. Ter_1 re-



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requests certain contents (blue directed line),
and then with the help of CS, SM succeeds in
finding parts of the contents pre-stored in
Ter_2 of user 2, but other parts are still miss-
ing. The decision (orange line) has been made:
the original request is broken into two. One is
a request to local peer Ter_2 for the cached
contents, and the other is a request by SM to
the CDN networks for the missing parts. After
this dispatch, the data streams are returned in
two flows (purple line) from Ter_2 and
Ter_1s Internet accesses. There are situations
other than that shown in Figure 3, but they all
share the same four basic steps.
The worst case for SM is when it has no
access to the Internet but the required contents
are not cached locally. In this situation, SM
will load a certain strategy to satisfy the users
needs. If it is a time-limited task, SM will split
the request to different terminals that can ac-
cess the Internet. Each terminal will download
part of the contents and then transmit them to
the original terminal which raises the request.
Finally the content parts are assembled at the
original request terminal. Regarding fairness,
other terminals may not be interested in help-
ing others without any interests at the time.
Then SM may return the request to the origi-
nal terminal with a message that SM cannot
help. Beyond the local domain, different SMs
can also be connected virtually through the
Internet to cooperate with and exchange their
LCC indexes. This will enlarge the basic local
content database, and increase the local hit
rate (i.e, the ratio of contents available in local
cache versus that the total number of re-
quests).
2.3 Applications
In this section, some potential application
cases for CACTSE are listed, and the detailed
process of CACTSE workflow is given.
Video content distribution: Video contents
will remain the majority of future network
traffic. Consider the new video coding tech-
nology Scalable Video Coding (SVC) [26]; it
is the name of the Annex G extension of the
H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video compression stan-
dard. SVC standardizes the encoding of a high-
quality video bit stream that also contains one
or more subset bit streams. A subset video bit
stream is derived by dropping packets from
the larger video to reduce the bandwidth re-
quired for the subset bit stream. The subset bit
stream can represent a lower spatial resolution
(smaller screen), lower temporal resolution
(lower frame rate), or lower quality video sig-
nal. The subset bit stream can be used when
the mobile access bandwidth to the Internet is
limited. But in the CACTSE system, when
more users request for the same video, they
will work together with the help of SM to pull
the larger bit stream without increasing the 3G
bandwidth required and get a better user ex-
perience. That is because, when one terminal
requests for the small bit stream of a video, the
request was sent to SM, and recorded in the
context server, so a small bit stream will return.
But when multiple terminals request the same
video (as can be known from the CS), SM will
recommend that the terminals cooperate to
pull the larger stream. If agreed (default), the
original request is substituted by the new gen-
erated request for the larger bit stream; each
terminal will request a part of the larger bit
stream as proposed by SM. When the different
parts arrives, the cooperating peers share
them, making the high quality video
available. At the same time, this content is
registered in the LCC for future requests. If
there are other users make the same request
to SM, a P2P reply will be formed as a re-
sponse to the request, so the content can be
shared locally to ease the Internet traffic.
Social based content recommendation:
Online social network has reshaped the way
contents are generated, distributed and con-
sumed on todays Internet. Given the massive
number of videos generated and shared in
online social networks, it has been popular for
users to directly access video contents in their
preferred social network services. It is in-



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triguing to study the service provision of so-
cial contents for global users with satisfactory
QoS experience. This trend of content distri-
bution will be discussed later in Section IV. In
CACTSE, the users are geographically in a
local domain, and most of the time, they are
friends in the virtual social networks, and they
tend to recommend some contents to each other.
However, not all the regions obey the above
law, for example, people in a common shop-
ping mall will seldom share similar interests
except for the various kinds of merchandise.
Moreover, some friends in this real world are
always friends in SNS, and friends are often
willing to share when they get together. If the
SNS relationship of CACTSE users can be
provided to CS, some corresponding recom-
mendations will result. A higher hit ratio can
be achieved.
Business model consideration: Advertis-
ing must be mentioned, because it is the tradi-
tional way to profit from the Internet. It is not
surprising that advertising is the driving force
of many websites and service providers on the
Internet. In the era of mobile Internet, and
especially in CACTSE, accurate advertising is
a possible and potential market. This is a huge
market for future media. MobiAd [27]
describes a new scalable, location-aware, per-
sonalised and private advertising system for
mobile platforms. In the CACTSE system,
personalised targeted ads are also possible.
SM helps to organise the mobile P2P network,
and most of all, the features of the local do-
main can be extracted from the Context Man-
ager (CM). From the data in CM the real
needs of the cluster can be revealed and then
the corresponding ads will be pushed to the
users. However, it is not proper to trace any-
ones network behaviour because of privacy.
The common request for the same contents
can reveal the users needs. Even what they
want to share with the others can reveal the
interests which advertisers are looking for. In
fact, the mobile Internet is tightly bound to
personalised services. The privacy of the
users, which is quite vulnerable to any mali-
cious monitoring, should always be respected.
CAO Man, QUAN Baixing, CHEN Tianzhou
and LOU Xueqing investigated the mobile
Internet courses application [28], which is a
kind of useful content distribution applica-
tion.
This section primarily discusses the archi-
tectures of CACTSE and gives a reference
design with detailed modules and mechanisms.
Furthermore, some potential applications are
also discussed. In the next section, research
progress and technology trends will be dis-
cussed.
III. PROGRESS AND TECHNOLOGY
TREND
In this section, some on-going and potential
trends of mobile content delivery technologies
are highlighted from three different aspects of
view, namely network performance, user and
contents as well as service architecture ad-
vancements.
3.1 Data throughput
Wireless throughput is of fundamental impor-
tance to mobile communications, especially in
the edge WiFi network of the CACTSE archi-
tecture .
Protocol optimization: Recently, an inno-
vative technology called WiFox [29] has been
proposed to greatly enhance the WiFi per-
formance of large audiences. This will also
help the mobile terminals which are equipped
with WiFi to achieve better network perform-
ance. WiFox is a protocol optimization for
wireless environment.
Network coding [30] is a novel mechanism
proposed to improve the group throughput of a
given network topology. The principle of net-
work coding is to allow intermediate nodes to
encode packets of contents, which can be ap-
plied by SM in CACTSE. Compared to tradi-
tional approaches (e.g., building multicast
trees), network coding makes optimal use of



China Communications

June 2013 55
the available network resources, and moreover,
computing a scheduling scheme that achieves
such rate is computationally easy. Network
coding requires prior knowledge of the net-
work topology, but that changes rapidly with
the mobile wireless terminals. In addition,
network coding can be a method for encryp-
tion and network security.
Wireless multicast: IP multicast is the
most frequently used multicast technology for
live video broadcast applications, in which a
multicast tree is built to transmit a certain IP
packet to a group of IP addresses. However, in
lower layers of some networks, the IP multi-
cast packed is copied to different unicast
packets, thus multicast turns into unicast in
lower layer of network and does not improve
the channel efficiency. And in many cases,
terminals access the multicast streams using
WiFi networks. However, multicast over
Wi-Fi suffers from several well-known prob-
lems such as low data rate, high losses and
unfairness compared to other contending uni-
cast transmissions. DirCast [31] has been
proposed to solve many of the problems. The
aim of the DirCast system is to minimise the
airtime consumed by the multicast traffic,
while simultaneously improving the client
experience. To meet these goals, the DirCast
also converts multicast packets to unicast pac-
kets. Compared with DirCast, in CACTSE, low
layer wireless multicast is possible because of
physical proximity. A data packet form an AP
to multi terminals will be transmitted in the air
just once, and the receivers can get the packet
respectively. Due to lack of ACKs in multicast
mechanisms, transmission accuracy cannot be
guaranteed. Using a unicast mechanism to
enhance the multicast performance is possible;
however, too many unicasts may also cause
collisions, thus making some specific situa-
tions even worse. There is a long way to go
before the high performance wireless multi-
cast technology can be applied. Beyond the
above, multicast is a provisioning technology
for local domain cooperation of CACTSE.
Mobility management: Multiple radio in-
terfaces are used at the same time for coopera-
tion, thus routing the packets between multi
terminals and interfaces will be a key function
of CACTSE. Faced with multiple paths, the
main consideration is how to allocate data
among different paths. Some protocols like
R-MTP [32] and pTCP [33] actively measure
the network parameters during data transmis-
sion, and allocate data accordingly beforehand.
It brings extra cost for computing and does not
take advantage of transport layer protocols con-
trol mechanism. MPTCP [34] avoids the
out-of-order phenomenon at the receiver by
designing different sequence spaces for dif-
ferent paths. As for the edge network archi-
tecture, multipath transfer over transport layer
will change the semantics of transport layer
over IP layer. That means a single transport
session will not only be mapped to a network
layer connection, but with the same identifier.
Analogous protocols have been in research for
years, but work is still needed before they are
useful.
3.2 Users and contents
Since their introduction, Social Network [35]
Sites (SNS) such as MySpace, Facebook,
Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted millions of
users, many of whom have integrated these
sites into their daily routines. As of this writ-
ing, there are hundreds of SNSs with various
technological features supporting a wide range
of interests and practices. Social networking
corresponds to real social relationships. In-
formation sharing in SNS will reflect the rela-
tionships of the users, thus deeply influence
content distribution and can be used for con-
tents recommendation and presetting. Mobile
Internet liberates SNS from desktops to the
mobile devices, and reveals the true nature of
social networks. Consequently, anyone can
access, share and pull content anywhere
through the SNS. The community features are
the most interesting aspects of SNS. A user
belongs to a community, and users within a



56 China Communications

June 2013
community will share the same interests, then
the corresponding contents can be pre- pushed
to the users cloudlet when the network is not
heavily loaded. And some time later, the user
request certain contents, thus on-demand con-
tent pulling becomes a local file transmission,
and efficient usage of the network bandwidth
can be achieved. Recommendation system
based on SNS is especially appropriate for
mobile environment. When a terminal is free to
access the Internet, recommended contents can
be downloaded for future use. People in places
such as restaurants can be thought as a com-
munity, and they share the same interests of
food, so information about food may be popu-
lar in that community. Then the contents can
be preloaded and updated for the customer,
although not all customers will consume the
contents. In the same way, if a tourist guide
can be stored at viewpoints, locally coopera-
tive transmission will replace a lot of re-
peated downloading. Taking advantage of
the common content demands of a user
community is the main purpose of such algo-
rithms, whether by LBS or SNS or the user
context.
3.3 Service architecture advances
There is a heated discussion on future Internet
evolution. Some think IPv6 will lead the way,
and some others propose Software Definition
Networks (SDNs) [36]

as a clean state archi-
tecture. OpenFlow [37]

is one of the standards
of SDN. Initially, SDN was a new way for
researchers to run experimental protocols in
the networks they use every day. OpenFlow is
based on an Ethernet switch, with an internal
flow-table and a standardised interface to add
and remove flow entries. The goal is to en-
courage networking vendors to add OpenFlow
to their switch products for deployment in col-
lege campus backbones and wiring closets.
With the development of OpenFlow, research-
ers realised that only in such an open way can
innovations be deployed quickly. However, as
described above, OpenFlow does not support
wireless applications. Then comes OpenWiFi
[38] and OpenRadio [39], which are trying to
apply OpenFlow to wireless. A core concept of
SDN is the virtualization of control and data
plane to achieve better flexibility of networks.
As introduced in Chapter II, SM in CACTSE
system is mainly in charge of controlling the
network, and it is the counterpart of the con-
troller in OpenFlow. In the framework of
wireless SDN, virtualization will unify the
various terminals and facilitate management,
which may give birth to a new standard of
CACTSE. And virtualization can be a better
bridge between mobile Internet and the Inter-
net. SDN and virtualization are trends of the
future Internet and also the direction of mobile
Internet and CACTSE.
In this section, the progress and trend tech-
nologies of CACTSE have been discussed
according to the three aspects of network per-
formance, users and contents, and service ar-
chitecture advancement.
IV. CONCLUSION
We introduce CACTSE, which is a content
distribution system for mobile terminals and
also supports multiple extended functions.
This paper describes a recommended architec-
ture, mechanism, and some typical use cases.
The CACTSE concept envisions mobile ter-
minals connected to each other directly with
the help of SM, forming a cloudlet to access
the Internet for content both online and locally
offline. This new architecture fits the needs of
users who would like to enjoy the high quality
digital contents while not increasing the 3G
Internet bandwidth needed. The technology
trend of mobile content distribution is also
discussed in detail, including network per-
formance, users and contents and service archi-
tecture advancements. They are the key to
providing an energy-saving, private, secure
and high-speed content delivery system in a
local edge network to achieve better content
service experience.



China Communications

June 2013 57
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The authors would like to thank the reviewers
for their detailed reviews and constructive
comments, which have helped to improve the
quality of this paper. This work was partially
supported by the New Generation Broadband
Wireless Mobile Communication Network
Key Project under Grant No. 2011ZX03005-
004-02; the National Natural Science Founda-
tion of China under Grants No. 60971125, No.
61101119; the Funds for Creative Research
Groups of China under Grant No. 61121001;
the European Commission FP7 Project EVANS
under Grant No. 2010-269323; and the Pro-
gram for Changjiang Scholars and Innovative
Research Team in University of China under
Grant No. IRT1049.
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Biographies
WANG Qing, recieved his Bachelor degree of elec-



China Communications

June 2013 59

tronic information science and technology at Central
South University (CSU), China in 2010. Now he is a
Ph.D. candidate in Beijing University of Posts and
Telecommunicatins (BUPT), China. His research inte-
rest lies in resource management on wireless ubiqu-
itous networking. Recently, he has participated in
some projects as a researcher, such as Chinese Key
Program project, 863 project, the NSFC project and
the international cooperation projects. Email:
valentine@bupt. edu.cn

HU Zheng, an Associate Professor with the Dep-
artment of Information and Communication Engi-
neering, Beijing University of Posts and Teleco-
mmunications, China. He received his Ph.D. degree
at Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunica-
tions, China in 2008. He engages in the research on
the ubiquitous networking and service computing.
He now focuses on the architecture and services in
ubiquitous PAN and WAN convergence envi-
ronment. Recently, he participates in many projects
as a coordinator, such as Chinese Key Program
project, 863 project, 973 Program project, the NSFC
project and the international cooperation projects.
*The corresponding author. Email: huzheng@bupt.
edu.cn

WANG Ming, is currently working toward his M.S.
degree with the Wireless Technology Innovation
Institute, Beijing University of Posts and Teleco-
mmunications, Beijing, China. His research interests
include distributed systems, content delivery network,
mobile cloud computing, and group recommend-
ation systems. Email: wmbetter@gmail.com

LIU Haifeng, recieved his B.S. degree at University
of Jinan and his M.S. degree at Beijing University of
Technology, and he is now a Ph.D. candidate at
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications
from 2011. His research interests include social
network, recommendation systems, data mining,
and user behavior analysis. He has published one
SCI- indexed paper in Europhysics Letters (EPL) (IF:
2.17) and one conference paper in the 14th
International Conference on Electronic Commerce
and Web Technologies (ECWeb) during the first
two years of Ph.D. Email: haifengliu2011@gmail.
com