1 research outputs found
Content dissemination in participatory delay tolerant networks
As experience with the Web 2.0 has demonstrated, users have evolved from being only consumers
of digital content to producers. Powerful handheld devices have further pushed this
trend, enabling users to consume rich media (for example, through high resolution displays), as
well as create it on the go by means of peripherals such as built-in cameras.
As a result, there is an enormous amount of user-generated content, most of which is
relevant only within local communities. For example, students advertising events taking place
around campus. For such scenarios, where producers and consumers of content belong to the
same local community, networks spontaneously formed on top of colocated user devices can
offer a valid platform for sharing and disseminating content.
Recently, there has been much research in the field of content dissemination in mobile
networks, most of which exploits user mobility prediction in order to deliver messages from
the producer to the consumer, via spontaneously formed Delay Tolerant Networks (DTNs).
Common to most protocols is the assumption that users are willing to participate in the content
distribution network; however, because of the energy restrictions of handheld devices, users’
participation cannot be taken for granted.
In this thesis, we design content dissemination protocols that leverage information about
user mobility, as well as interest, in order to deliver content, while avoiding overwhelming noninterested
users. We explicitly reason about battery consumption of mobile devices to model
participation, and achieve fairness in terms of workload distribution. We introduce a dynamic
priority scheduling framework, which enables the network to allocate the scarce energy resources
available to support the delivery of the most desired messages. We evaluate this work
extensively by means of simulation on a variety of real mobility traces and social networks, and
draw a comparative evaluation with the major related works in the field