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.
This study investigates replication of data in a novel streaming architecture consisting of ad-hoc networks of wireless devices. One application of these devices is home-to-home (H2O) entertainment systems where a device collaborates with others to provide each household with on-demand access to a large selection of audio and video clips. These devices are configured with a substantial amount of storage and may cache several clips for future use. A contribution of this study is a technique to compute the number of replicas for a clip based on the square-root of the product of bandwidth required to display clips and their frequency of access , i.e., where . We provide a proof to show this strategy is near optimal when the objective is to maximize the number of simultaneous displays in the system with string and grid (both symmetric and asymmetric) topologies. We say “near optimal” because values of less than 0.5 may be more optimum. In addition, we use analytical and simulation studies to demonstrate its superiority when compared with other alternatives. A second contribution is an analytical model to estimate the theoretical upper bound on the number of simultaneous displays supported by an arbitrary grid topology of H2O devices. This analytical model is useful during capacity planning because it estimates the capabilities of a H2O configuration by considering: the size of an underlying repository, the number of nodes in a H2O cloud, the representative grid topology for this cloud, and the expected available network bandwidth and storage capacity of each device. It shows that one may control the ratio of repository size to the storage capacity of participating nodes in order to enhance system performance. We validate this analytical model with a simulation study and quantify its tradeoffs. Sensor networks are often desired to last many times longer than the active lifetime of individual sensors. This is usually achieved by putting sensors to sleep for most of their lifetime. On the other hand, surveillance kind of applications require guaranteed k-coverage of the protected region at all times. As a result, determining the appropriate number of sensors to deploy that achieves both goals simultaneously becomes a challenging problem. In this paper, we consider three kinds of deployments for a sensor network on a unit square - a √n x √n grid, random uniform (for all n points), and Poisson (with density n). In all three deployments, each sensor is active with probability p, independently from the others. Then, we claim that the critical value of the function npπr2 log(np) is 1 for the event of k-coverage of every point. We also provide an upper bound on the window of this phase transition. Although the conditions for the three deployments are similar, we obtain sharper bounds for the random deployments than the grid deployment, which occurs due to the boundary condition. In this paper, we also provide corrections to previously published results for the grid deployment model. Finally, we use simulation to show the usefulness of our analysis in real deployment scenarios.