Today's cellular networks for wireless communication are required to support a large variety of content. Some examples of such content typically exchanged in a communication network include voice calls, video calls, small and large data files, streaming of audio and video and so on. In addition to the various forms of content, the networks have to deal with transferring the content at different times during the day and night. This leads to a highly fluctuating traffic volume during the day and night hours. Still further, the traffic volume also differs from one cell to the other.
Thus, when planning and designing capacity in a cellular network, the different peaks of traffic volume or load in the different cells in the network are taken into account in order to provide a reliable communication network that will, to a large extent, provide requested communication services to all the customers in each cell, also during peak hour traffic.
Because the communication networks are designed to provide or support requested communication services to all the customers in each cell, including the peak hour traffic, substantial capacity exists in the networks which remains unused during off-peak hours. During off-peak hours, the traffic volume or load is smaller, which means that the capacity which remains unused is wasted. This increases the cost of operating the communication network.
In order to smooth out the traffic volume or load over time, the radio network can control caching of information communication which need not be delivered in real-time.
One approach disclosed in U.S. Patent Application Publication No. 2010/0267403, the entire content of which is included herein by reference, uses client caching for radio optimization. However, this approach relies on the fact that the storage part of the client is owned and, thus, controlled by the network operator and not by the user. This concept is similar to the solutions used in fixed networks where the hard-disk of, for example, top-box, is partitioned in two parts. One part is controlled by the operator and the end-user cannot reach this part.
Other known proposal is to download the content to the client in the application layer. However, at the time of the present invention there are no possibilities to control the download from the network and, thus, there is no gain from a radio network perspective.
Still other methods have been suggested that take into account the subscribers' environmental conditions when delivering the content. One such architecture has been proposed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,013,149 (herein '149), the entire content of which is incorporated herein by reference. This method is based on a central entity, called Application Service Provider, that is provided in the core network and controls the delivery of multimedia services based, among others factors, on environmental information like, location parameters, network conditions, delivery capabilities, time parameters, and subscriber mobility characteristics. The environment information is reported by the mobile access network and/or a geo-location component.
However, there are some problems with the above-noted approaches as discussed next. A first problem is that a mobile device is an end-user owned equipment. In the fixed networks, the operator selects the type of set-top box that should be used to provide the service. This is not the case in the context of the mobile network. Thus, the operator cannot own a storage portion in the mobile device. Further, it is noted that the current application based approach cannot be used to optimize the radio network. The mobile client has no knowledge of the load in the network and the applications are not designed to consider these problems.
While the environment-aware architectures like the one proposed in '149 are capable to partially optimize the radio resources, because the control is located in the core network, it is not possible to provide quick feedback about the available radio resources in order to achieve a spectrum-efficient content scheduling.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide devices, systems and methods that avoid the afore-described problems and drawbacks.