A Lightweight Distributed Solution to Content Replication in Mobile Networks

Performance and reliability of content access in mobile networks is conditioned by the number and location of content replicas deployed at the network nodes. Facility location theory has been the traditional, centralized approach to study content replication: computing the number and placement of replicas in a network can be cast as an uncapacitated facility location problem. The endeavour of this work is to design a distributed, lightweight solution to the above joint optimization problem, while taking into account the network dynamics. In particular, we devise a mechanism that lets nodes share the burden of storing and providing content, so as to achieve load balancing, and decide whether to replicate or drop the information so as to adapt to a dynamic content demand and time-varying topology. We evaluate our mechanism through simulation, by exploring a wide range of settings and studying realistic content access mechanisms that go beyond the traditional assumptionmatching demand points to their closest content replica. Results show that our mechanism, which uses local measurements only, is: (i) extremely precise in approximating an optimal solution to content placement and replication; (ii) robust against network mobility; (iii) flexible in accommodating various content access patterns, including variation in time and space of the content demand.Comment: 12 page

Amorphous Placement and Informed Diffusion for Timely Monitoring by Autonomous, Resource-Constrained, Mobile Sensors

Personal communication devices are increasingly equipped with sensors for passive monitoring of encounters and surroundings. We envision the emergence of services that enable a community of mobile users carrying such resource-limited devices to query such information at remote locations in the field in which they collectively roam. One approach to implement such a service is directed placement and retrieval (DPR), whereby readings/queries about a specific location are routed to a node responsible for that location. In a mobile, potentially sparse setting, where end-to-end paths are unavailable, DPR is not an attractive solution as it would require the use of delay-tolerant (flooding-based store-carry-forward) routing of both readings and queries, which is inappropriate for applications with data freshness constraints, and which is incompatible with stringent device power/memory constraints. Alternatively, we propose the use of amorphous placement and retrieval (APR), in which routing and field monitoring are integrated through the use of a cache management scheme coupled with an informed exchange of cached samples to diffuse sensory data throughout the network, in such a way that a query answer is likely to be found close to the query origin. We argue that knowledge of the distribution of query targets could be used effectively by an informed cache management policy to maximize the utility of collective storage of all devices. Using a simple analytical model, we show that the use of informed cache management is particularly important when the mobility model results in a non-uniform distribution of users over the field. We present results from extensive simulations which show that in sparsely-connected networks, APR is more cost-effective than DPR, that it provides extra resilience to node failure and packet losses, and that its use of informed cache management yields superior performance

Multimedia Correlation Analysis in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Network

Recent years saw the rapid development of peer-topeer (P2P) networks in a great variety of applications. However, similarity-based k-nearest-neighbor retrieval (k-NN) is still a challenging task in P2P networks due to the multiple constraints such as the dynamic topologies and the unpredictable data updates. Caching is an attractive solution that reduces network traffic and hence could remedy the technological constraints of P2P networks. However, traditional caching techniques have some major shortcomings that make them unsuitable for similarity search, such as the lack of semantic locality representation and the rigidness of exact matching on data objects. To facilitate the efficient similarity search, we propose semantic-aware caching scheme (SAC) in this paper. The proposed scheme is hierarchy-free, fully dynamic, non-flooding, and do not add much system overhead. By exploring the content distribution, SAC drastically reduces the cost of similarity-based k-NN retrieval in P2P networks. The performance of SAC is evaluated through simulation study and compared against several search schemes as advanced in the literature

Reducing Latency by Clustering Based Index Services using Hybrid Cache in Ad Hoc Networks

An efficient index structure is presented to guide mobile clients to the - objects. The proposed broadcast scheduling and indexing is aimed at minimizing query access time and energy consumption of the clients when retrieving - objects through wireless channels . W e design and evaluate cooperative caching techniques to efficiently support data access in ad hoc networks. We first propose two schemes: Cache Data , which caches the data, and Cache Path , which caches the data path. After analyzing the performance of those two schemes, we propose a hybrid approach ( Hybrid Cache ), which can further improve the performance by taking advantage of Cache Data and Cache Path while avoiding their weaknesses. Cache replacement policies are also studied to further improve the performance. Simulation results show that the proposed schemes can signifi cantly reduce the query delay and message complexity when compared to other caching schemes

Pervasive Data Access in Wireless and Mobile Computing Environments

The rapid advance of wireless and portable computing technology has brought a lot of research interests and momentum to the area of mobile computing. One of the research focus is on pervasive data access. with wireless connections, users can access information at any place at any time. However, various constraints such as limited client capability, limited bandwidth, weak connectivity, and client mobility impose many challenging technical issues. In the past years, tremendous research efforts have been put forth to address the issues related to pervasive data access. A number of interesting research results were reported in the literature. This survey paper reviews important works in two important dimensions of pervasive data access: data broadcast and client caching. In addition, data access techniques aiming at various application requirements (such as time, location, semantics and reliability) are covered