Greening the Smart Cities: Energy-Efficient Massive Content Delivery via D2D Communications

Massive multimedia services have been considered as one the most prominent characteristics for smart cities. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient content delivery system via the device-to-device communications, which realizes the large-scale content delivery among mobile devices with constrained energy, unpredictable demand, limited storage, random mobility, and opportunistic transmission. The highlights of this paper lie in two parts. On the theoretical end, through exploring the relationship among the coding, storage, and transmission, a systematic energy-saving content delivery fashion is investigated. On the technical end, a totally distributed content delivery system is designed in a simple and efficient manner, in which each device only utilizes local information to make decisions and implements its own scheme individually. Importantly, the proposed scheme is realized in a practical smart city system, and numerical results demonstrate that it is flexible to various users’ needs and communication environments.