Pervasive Peer to Peer Content Distribution in Ad Hoc Networks
Seung-Seok Kang
The content sharing is very popular in the Internet, especially in the wired Internet. Mobile devices with wireless LAN (WLAN) has a difficulty in providing pervasive communication due to its limited coverage and the scarce of the access points. Wireless wide area network (WWAN) offers to access the Internet almost anywhere pervasively due to its wide service coverage, but it pays comparatively high telecommunication cost. If the cost of downloading data from the Internet is proportional to the amount of received data, it is beneficial for several participating devices, called peers, to cooperate each other to reduce the cost to download Internet content. If each peer equips with dual channels, it downloads an assigned unique portion of the content via its WWAN interface and distributes the portion to neighbor participating peers over WLAN interface in order for all participating peers to rebuild the whole content. One of the challenges in this model is that all cooperating peers are senders as well as receivers. Without a controlled mechanism, many packets will collide frequently, and the distribution process will fail. This paper proposes three efficient distribution algorithms and compares the performance with an existing approach. According to the simulation results, discarding unnecessary forwarding peers shortens the overall content distribution time. In addition, precise recording of neighbors’ data reception status also improves the performance of the content distribution up to 44%.
Keywords: Content distribution, dual channel, ad hoc network, content sharing, benefit value, cooperative network