Reliable and geo-localized content search in mobile networks

The current trend for wireless tactical networks is to employ ad hoc approaches, in which a network infrastructure is not needed and nodes are self-organized, for improved reliability and reduced setup time. However, this creates the need for new or modified protocols from the medium access control (MAC)layer and above. In this paper we propose a transport-layer service for data distribution, suitable for mobile and delay-tolerant networks. Our solution is based on a pure peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay, in which we embedded two features which are important for practical applications: i) reliability, i.e., multiple copies of the same content are disseminated to make the data available even when some nodes are temporarily unreachable; ii) support to geo-localized searches, i.e., nodes can request data relevant to a given geographical area efficiently and without relying on an external/centralized server. The proposed solution is shown to be effective through numerical simulations.