Mobile Computing in Digital Ecosystems: Design Issues and Challenges

In this paper we argue that the set of wireless, mobile devices (e.g., portable telephones, tablet PCs, GPS navigators, media players) commonly used by human users enables the construction of what we term a digital ecosystem, i.e., an ecosystem constructed out of so-called digital organisms (see below), that can foster the development of novel distributed services. In this context, a human user equipped with his/her own mobile devices, can be though of as a digital organism (DO), a subsystem characterized by a set of peculiar features and resources it can offer to the rest of the ecosystem for use from its peer DOs. The internal organization of the DO must address issues of management of its own resources, including power consumption. Inside the DO and among DOs, peer-to-peer interaction mechanisms can be conveniently deployed to favor resource sharing and data dissemination. Throughout this paper, we show that most of the solutions and technologies needed to construct a digital ecosystem are already available. What is still missing is a framework (i.e., mechanisms, protocols, services) that can support effectively the integration and cooperation of these technologies. In addition, in the following we show that that framework can be implemented as a middleware subsystem that enables novel and ubiquitous forms of computation and communication. Finally, in order to illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we introduce some experimental results we have obtained from preliminary implementations of (parts of) that subsystem.Comment: Proceedings of the 7th International wireless Communications and Mobile Computing conference (IWCMC-2011), Emergency Management: Communication and Computing Platforms Worksho

Distance-Based Opportunistic Mobile Data Offloading.

Cellular network data traffic can be offload onto opportunistic networks. This paper proposes a Distance-based Opportunistic Publish/Subscribe (DOPS) content dissemination model, which is composed of three layers: application layer, decision-making layer and network layer. When a user wants new content, he/she subscribes on a subscribing server. Users having the contents decide whether to deliver the contents to the subscriber based on the distance information. If in the meantime a content owner has traveled further in the immediate past time than the distance between the owner and the subscriber, the content owner will send the content to the subscriber through opportunistic routing. Simulations provide an evaluation of the data traffic offloading efficiency of DOPS

Social-Aware Stateless Forwarding in Pocket Switched Networks

Several social-aware routing protocols for pocket switched networks have been recently introduced in the literature. The main idea underlying these protocols is to exploit state information (e.g., history of past encounters) to deduce information on the social structure of the network, and to optimize routing based on this information. While social-aware routing protocols have been shown to have superior performance to social-oblivious, stateless routing protocols such as, e.g., BinarySW, the improvement comes at the cost of considerable storage overhead required on the nodes, which is instead not required for stateless approaches. So, whether the benefits of social-aware routing protocols would still be present when storage capacity at the nodes is constrained is not clear. In this paper we present SANE, the first forwarding mechanism that combines the advantages of both social-aware and stateless approaches. SANE is based on the observation-that we validate on real-world traces-that individuals with similar interests tend to meet more often. In our approach, individuals (network members) are characterized by their interest profile, a compact representation of their interests. By implementing a simple interest profile similarity based forwarding rule, SANE is free of network state information, thus overcoming the storage capacity problem with existing social-aware approaches. Through extensive experiments, we show the superiority of social-aware, stateless forwarding over existing stateful, social-aware and stateless, social-oblivious routing approaches. An important byproduct of our interest-based approach is that it easily enables innovative routing primitives, such as interest-casting. An interest-casting protocol is also introduced in this paper, and extensively evaluated through experiments based on both real-world and synthetic mobility traces

On exploiting priority relation graph for reliable multi-path communication in mobile social networks

© 2018 Elsevier Inc. A mobile social network (MSN) consists of certain amount of mobile users with social characteristics, and it provides data delivery concerning social relationships between mobile users. In MSN, ordinary people contact each other more frequently if they have more social features in common. In this paper, we apply a new topology structure–priority relation graph (PRG) to evaluate the data delivery routing in MSN on the system-level. By using the natural order of nodes’ representation, the diameter, the regular degree and the multi-path technology, we determine the priority relation graph-based social feature routing (PRG-SFR) algorithm to find disjointed multi-paths in MSN. Here, the multi-path technology can be exploited for ensuring that, between each pair of sender and receiver, the important information can be delivered through a highly reliable path. Then we calculate the tolerant ability of ‘faults’ and estimate the availability of MSN on the theoretical level. Finally, we analyze the efficiency of PRG-SFR algorithm from the numerical standpoint in terms of fault tolerance, forwarding number, transmission time and delivery rate. Moreover, we make comparisons between PRG-SFR algorithm and certain state-of-the-art technologies