Abstract

The never ending demand for capacity and the need for ubiquitous radio coverage requires attention to the design of new radio networks. Incoming paradigms (industry 4.0, machine to machine communication and Internet of Things) will overburden even more cellular networks. Current (4G) and near-future (5G) architecture will not be able to support such traffic increase. Moreover, space-time and content heterogeneity of data should be exploited to improve network performance. However, current networks performance are deteriorated by this heterogeneity. Pico- and femto-cell networks, with cell densification, are proposed as solution. A drawback, is the urgency of high-speed backhaul to connect the cells among themselves and the core network. Current research trends assume that the density of cells will be comparable to user density. In such a situation, deploying high-speed backhaul will be expensive. Moreover, regardless whatever deployment of cells, connectivity is a commodity given as always granted. Modern technologies and services rely on stable networks. Nonetheless, whenever also a basic connectivity fails because of a disaster, not even a basic form of radio communication can be provided. Flexible networks adapting to the environment "on the go", could reduce this problem. A to alleviate the aforementioned problems, My work unfolds starting from a couple of intuitions. 1- Traffic demand is not just a data to be processed, transmitted and answered to. The kind of data producing the traffic matters. Thus, we should treat different traffic streams accordingly. This facet of my work is treated under different points of view in the dissertation. 2- In current networks, users are seen as "passive", being just source and/or destination of a traffic stream. There are reasons to envision that users could be exploited as "active" users participating to the network itself fostering its performance. This considerations are accounted in the so called Delay Tolerant Networks.