An efficient one-to-many content distribution method for Wi-Fi networks

Recently, along with the widespread use of Wi-Fi devices, there has been high expectation for contents sharing in the Wi-Fi networks that consists of large number of nodes. In this paper, we present an efficient one-to-many content distribution method for Wi-Fi networks. In our method, a source node selects a representative node from destination nodes which requested for the same content and then sends the content to the selected representative node by using TCP. At the same time, the rest of destination nodes receive the content by overhearing TCP traffic generated from the source node to the representative node. We also present a technique to enable overhearing in an environment which employs pairwise key and group key based encryption mechanism such as WPA. Finally, we evaluate the effectiveness of our method through simulations using QualNet. Our simulation results show that our method can shorten the content delivery time up to 94% compared with content distribution using FTP in the network consists of 500 nodes.