A cooperative cache-based content delivery framework for intermittently connected mobile ad hoc networks

For an infrastructure-less wireless environment, content dissemination among mobile users can be facilitated by self-organizing mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) through low cost wireless connections. However, due to limited radio transmission range, sporadic node densities and power limitations, MANETs can become intermittently connected. As a result, some proposed solutions exploit mobility and storage space of the nodes to distribute contents even if a route never exists. In all these mechanisms, whenever two mobile nodes encounter each other, each node only focuses on making independent disseminating decisions to improve the overall performance. With this in mind, this paper presents a cooperative cache-based content dissemination framework (CCCDF) to carry out the cooperative soliciting and caching strategies for the two encountering nodes. Two cooperative strategies are investigated: CCCDF (Optimal) is to maximize the overall content delivery performance while CCCDF (Max-Min) is to share the limited network resources among the contents in a Max-Min fairness manner. Simulation results demonstrated the enhanced delivery performance offered by the proposed CCCDF over existing schemes.