Opportunistic content sharing applications

Abstract

Opportunistic communication between mobile nodes allows for asynchronous content sharing within groups. Limiting the spread of information to a geographic area creates an infrastructure-less variant of digital graffiti, a social network with coupling in space and limited decoupling in time. Due to its nature, this kind of a communication network lends itself readily to name-oriented abstractions. In this paper, we extend our previous work on floating content, extract its fundamental characteristics, and define a system model and a simple API with a set of basic programming elements to support applications in leveraging opportunistic content sharing as a generic communication facility. We validate our API through application examples and show how their communication needs are mapped to our model. In addition, we also implement our API in our simulator and demonstrate the feasibility of these kinds of applications.

Characterizing content sharing properties for mobile users in open city squares

“…In our previous work [15], we showed that acquisition times for content upon a node entering an anchor zone are typically a few minutes. In [15] we also presented example applications and we now contrast them against the results in this paper, in particular the square mobility case.…”

“…In [15] we also presented example applications and we now contrast them against the results in this paper, in particular the square mobility case.…”

“…For applications where users are on the move (e.g., digital graffiti or regional chat from [15]), the requirement to stay in the anchor zone would be too onerous. However, given that these applications attempt to establish communications between two or more users, you would likely use a larger anchor zone, i.e., effectively meeting the sojourn constraints.…”

“…A small-scale example is the auction [15] in a flea market. The area is small, but as people are likely to remain browsing the market for long durations, it is probable that the system meets the more stringent constraints defined in this paper.…”

Enabling ad-hoc-style communication in public WLAN hot-spots

“…Delay-tolerant networking between mobile nodes exploiting opportunistic contacts between the devices as their users move around has been a research topic for many years, yielding diverse communication and software architectures [23,4,21,14], a myriad of routing protocols, and a diverse set of applications [1,20,7,6,13,8,9], to name just a few.…”