TurfCast: A Service for Controlling Information Dissemination in Wireless Networks

Recent years have witnessed mass proliferation of mobile devices with rich wireless communication capabilities as well as emerging mobile device-based information dissemination applications that leverage these capabilities. This paper proposes TurfCast, a novel information dissemination service that selectively broadcasts information in particular "turfs,â abstract logical spaces in which receivers are situated. Such turfs can be temporal or spatial based on receivers\´ lingering time or physical areas, respectively. TurfCast has many applications such as electronic proximity advertising and mobile social networking. To enable TurfCast, we propose two supporting technologies: TurfCode and TurfBurst. TurfCode is a nested 0-1 fountain code that enables the broadcaster to transmit either all information or none at all to receivers. TurfBurst exploits the Shannon bound to differentiate among receivers: those who cannot receive information fast enough receive none at all, even if they linger near the broadcaster. We implement TurfCast on real-world devices and conduct experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments. Our experimental results illustrate TurfCast\´s potential for controlling information dissemination in wireless networks.