A Holistic Approach to Information Distribution in Ad Hoc Networks

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.