Not So Far: Improving Autonomous Content Discovery within Mobile Pedestrian Crowds

摘要

The explosion of traffic demands in the edge of the Internet, mostly by mobile users, is putting under pressure current networking infrastructure. This is particularly acute when huge amounts of users and active wireless devices gather in reduced geographical spaces, increasing the risk of exceeding planned capacity of deployed infrastructure. This trend motivates research on mechanisms to offload part of the user injected traffic from the access infrastructure networks and reduce the need of Internet requests and retrievals. This paper concentrates on the ability of mobile meshes to fulfill the requests for contents originated within the mesh, with minimal intervention of the Internet access infrastructure. We propose, discuss and evaluate simple heuristics to improve autonomous content discovery and dissemination within such mobile meshes, characterized by high density and low (pedestrian) mobility, by combining notions already explored in the context of MANET routing: deliberate jittering and autonomous overlay pruning based on link distance. Results over synthetic networks and real mobility traces indicate that proposed mechanisms can be easily deployed and are able to improve efficiency and quality of content request discoveries, by reducing significantly the collisions and increasing the stability of discovered paths in crowded mesh pedestrian networks.