An Epidemic P2P Content Search Mechanism for Intermittently Connected Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract-Recently, popularity of multimedia content sharing among the Internet users and development of wireless mobile devices have promoted a trend of deploying Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks over mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) for mobile content distribution. However, due to limited radio transmission range, sporadic node densities and power limitations, MANETs may become intermittently connected thereby disrupting such mobile content distribution. Even though, various content delivery schemes have been proposed in the literature to resolve such underlying intermittent connectivity, another key issue for P2P content distribution networks i.e., how to search or lookup the interested contents in intermittently connected MANETs (ICMANs) context, is not investigated. With this in mind, this paper deploys a fully decentralized unstructured P2P network over ICMANs and accordingly introduces epidemic content search mechanism to discover the interested contents based on the related keywords. Note that the mobility and storage space of the mobile peers are exploited here to diffuse the content search requests. Moreover, to improve the efficiency under the restricted storage space conditions, a utility-based buffer management policy is presented. By evaluating each possible search request based on the relevant information such as mobility statistics, the requests with lower evaluated values are accordingly discarded when the buffer is full. Simulation results demonstrate the enhanced service performance offered by epidemic P2P content search scheme with utility-based buffer management policy.