Cooperative Content Dissemination in Intermittently Connected Networks

Over the last few years, the popularity of multimedia content sharing among the Internet users has promoted a new kind of networking where the content dissemination is determined by the interests of users rather than pre-specified destinations. Development of wireless mobile devices has further enhanced the trend of content exchange among the mobile users. However, such mobile nodes based content dissemination may suffer the underlying intermittent connectivity due to the inherent limitations such as short radio transmission range, sporadic node densities and constrained power. To this effect, some solutions have been proposed in the literature that exploit the 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. However, even though each node can get its own optimized decisions, it may not be an optimized decision between the two encountering nodes. With this in mind, this paper presents a cooperative content dissemination framework (CCDF) with an analytical model to select and store the contents that maximizes the overall content delivery probability in the future. Simulation results demonstrate the enhanced delivery performance offered by the proposed CCDF over existing schemes.