Tactful opportunistic forwarding: What human routines and cooperation can improve?

Opportunistic D2D forwarding algorithms have leveraged human mobility characteristics to improve cost-effective content delivery. Most previous proposals focused on traditional or simplistic human-centered metrics to improve performance in scenarios such as cellular data offloading. Still, there is a need to approximate algorithm's metrics to inherent in-depth aspects of human mobility hidden into real datasets while leveraging more realistic scenarios interesting to mobile operators. This work proposes TOOTS, a novel human-aware opportunistic D2D forwarding strategy for cost-effective content delivery on cellular networks. TOOTS features a dissemination policy and a forwarding algorithm that leverages wireless encounters patterns, temporal, spatial, geographic, and direction awareness to improve cost-effectiveness delivery. These characteristics are extracted from NCCU and GRM datasets. We compare TOOTS with the most popular state-of-art social-aware algorithm, Bubble Rap, combined with three dissemination policies. Results from TOOTS show increased performance in terms of delivery rate, delivery latency, and overhead.