Ravi Kokku from IRL, along with R. Mahindra, S. Rangarajan and H. Zhang of NEC Labs, Princeton, received the ACM MobiSys 2011 Best Demo Award, July 2011.
The demo presented a system for aligning advertisement delivery with basestation overloads in a cellular operator's network. During basestation overload, mobile users connected to a basestation perceive degraded quality of experience. Avoiding basestation overloads completely, however, requires significantly increasing the network provisioning, which in turn increases the network costs. Instead, the proposed system "masks off" such overloads by selecting some active users at a time and serving them low rate advertisements, while letting other active users achieve their required bandwidth for good quality of experience. The system also maintains fairness across users, by attempting to equalize the number of advertisements seen by users. Hence, the system helps the cellular network operator improve the overall availability of the network to users, without incurring high costs, while also generating revenues from advertising.
The demo session at the conference contained 22 other peer-reviewed high quality demos on varying topics in mobile computing and networking.