Opportunistic content distribution in an urban setting

Abstract

This paper investigates the feasibility of a city-wide content distribution architecture composed of short range wireless access points. We look at how a target group of intermittently and partially connected mobile nodes can improve the diffusion of information within the group by leveraging fixed and mobile nodes that are exterior to the group. The fixed nodes are data sources, and the external mobile nodes are data relays, and we examine the trade off between the use of each in order to obtain high satisfaction within the target group, which consists of data sinks. We conducted an experiment in Cambridge, UK, to gather mobility traces that we used for the study of this content distribution architecture. In this scenario, the simple fact that members of the target group collaborate leads to a delivery ratio of 90%. In addition, the use of external mobile nodes to relay the information slightly increases the delivery ratio while significantly decreasing the delay. Copyright 2006 ACM.