STIC-AmSud: UCOOL project accepted

The UCOOL (Understanding and predicting human demanded COntent and mObiLity) project will be granted by STIC-AmSUD.

Partners are :

• Laboratório Nacional de Computacão Científica (LNCC) in Brazil
• Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de Buenos Aires (FI/UBA)  in Argentina
• Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria (USM) in Chile
• Telecom Sud Paris, in France
• INRIA Saclay – Ile de France and INRIA Grenoble – Rhône-Alpes in France

Project goals

• To define solutions for the identification and modelling of correlations between the user mobility – describing changes in the user positioning and the current environment he/she is in – and the traffic demand he/she generates.
• To develop techniques to predict the future user mobility and demanded content at both microscopic (i.e., individual user) and macroscopic (i.e., user communities) levels. The insights obtained from these studies will drive the proposal of new content- and context-aware networking protocols and/or applications that will explicitly leverage the mobility and interest of users to improve the perceived quality of their services and consequently, improve user satisfaction.
• To increase and to strength the scientific exchange, synergy and expertise between France and Latin-American countries for future research.

Abstract
Finding new ways to manage the increased data usage and to improve the level of service required by the new wave of applications for smartphones is an essential issue nowadays. The improved understanding of user mobility (i.e. the context they experience) and the content they demand is of fundamental importance when looking for solutions for this problem in the modern communication landscape. The resulting knowledge can help at the design of more adaptable networking protocols or services as well as can help determining, for instance, where to deploy networking infrastructure, how to reduce traffic congestion, or how to fill the gap between the capacity granted by the infrastructure technology and the traffic load generated by mobile users.

Building on previous research efforts in the fields of social wireless networking,
opportunistic communications, and content networking, the UCOOL project will derive appropriate models for the correlation between user interests and their mobility. Lots of studies have characterized the mobility of mobile nodes based on real world data traces, but knowledge about the interactions with user interests in this context is still missing. Moreover, efficient prediction algorithms will be derived to forecast the node’s mobility as well as interests. Predictions of future events (i.e., related to human mobility or the demanded content) can allow networking protocols or services to anticipate and react upon actions based on patterns learnt from human daily life. The partners involved in the project, located in France, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina, present complementary background and skills to address the context-content correlation and related prediction in mobile wireless networks. The main expected outcome of this project is the establishment and consolidation of a thematic and collaborative research network between the partners to deal with the challenges of leveraging human content and context knowledge. In doing so, we expect new tools and analyses to be developed as well as a new scientific foundation to be established to deal with increasing data usage in wireless mobile networks.