Opportunistic content pushing via WiFi hotspots

Metro WiFi networks can be potentially leveraged to offload data traffic from congested cellular networks. In this paper, we design a content pushing system which pushes the content to mobile users through opportunistic WiFi connections. The system responds a user's pending requests or predicted users' future requests, codes these requested contents by using Fountain codes, predicts the user's routes, and prelocates the coded content to the WiFi access points along the user's routes. The content prelocation scheme is based on an order-2 Markov predictor and the connection duration statistics. Through simulations, we show that a significant amount of content can be delivered to mobile users through the proposed system.