Abstract

The appearance of smartphones and increasing popularity of various mobile applications and services have caused the ex-plosion of mobile data traffic. To avoid overloading the cellu-lar networks, different offloading solutions (such as WiFi net-works or femtocells) have been proposed and adopted. Re-cently, offloading cellular traffic through opportunistic com-munications among mobile phones becomes a new and promis-ing option, due to free cost. In this paper, by using real trace data from the Orange “Data for Development ” (D4D) challenge, we investigate the feasibility of delivering data packets among mobile cellular users through opportunistic communications in a large scale network. Our experimental results show that by using social or location properties of mobile users opportunistic routing can indeed complement the traditional cellular network to deliver delay-tolerant data packets among certain portion of cellular users. Such solu-tion is especially cost efficient and beneficial for developing countries, as Ivory Coast. 1.