Ad-hoc networks at global scale

We argue that scalability in ad-hoc networks can be achieved by re-defining the functionality for the information transport system itself, where the functionality is driven by a new type of communication paradigm inherent in information dissemination applications. In particular, among the entire population of generated messages, each user desires only that the personally “most interesting” messages are delivered to them - we call this “star-to-one” communication. In the paper we consider a “Zipf product form” model for message preferences, and propose some decentralized algorithms for message forwarding based on this model. We discuss some simulation results for these algorithms, which suggest that it is possible for the users to efficiently obtain the messages that are of most interest to them. Essentially, the amount of “work” required of each user, on the average, is proportional to the desired number of messages to be received by each user, and is independent of the number of users and the number of messages in the network.