Location-assisted energy-efficient content search for mobile peer-to-peer networks

As mobile devices have become more powerful and ubiquitous in our daily life, sharing content objects among mobile platforms has become increasingly popular. Without the help of server infrastructures, clients usually form a mobile peer-to-peer (P2P) system as an ad-hoc network, and discover content objects by flooding query to neighboring peers. Such a flooding-based query method consumes communication energy of all relay users. Fortunately, we notice that recent emerging location-based services (LBS) have encouraged part of clients to provide their location information. Hence, in this paper, we propose a framework, called LocP2P (Location-assisted P2P), that better utilizes partial location information to provide peers a candidate list of content owners and the corresponding potential routing paths. Our evaluation results demonstrate that LocP2P can reduce the number of query flooding, and thereby save up to 50% energy consumption for content search in a mobile peer-to-peer system.