A Holistic Approach to Information Distribution in Ad Hoc Networks

TL;DR

This paper presents a distributed, low-overhead method for information dissemination in ad hoc networks that ensures fair, predefined distribution and adapts to changing content demand through a lightweight replication strategy.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, fully distributed approach for fair information distribution in ad hoc networks that adapts to dynamic content demand with a lightweight replication scheme.

Findings

The proposed method achieves fair and efficient information dissemination under different mobility models.

Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the approach across various network scenarios.

The adaptive replication scheme responds efficiently to changes in user content demand.

Abstract

We investigate the problem of spreading information contents in a wireless ad hoc network with mechanisms embracing the peer-to-peer paradigm. In our vision, information dissemination should satisfy the following requirements: (i) it conforms to a predefined distribution and (ii) it is evenly and fairly carried by all nodes in their turn. In this paper, we observe the dissemination effects when the information moves across nodes according to two well-known mobility models, namely random walk and random direction. Our approach is fully distributed and comes at a very low cost in terms of protocol overhead; in addition, simulation results show that the proposed solution can achieve the aforementioned goals under different network scenarios, provided that a sufficient number of information replicas are injected into the network. This observation calls for a further step: in the realistic case where the user content demand varies over time, we need a content replication/drop strategy to adapt the number of information replicas to the changes in the information query rate. We therefore devise a distributed, lightweight scheme that performs efficiently in a variety of scenarios.