A dynamic content distribution scheme for decentralized sharing in tourist hotspots

Abstract

Decentralized content sharing (DCS) is emerging as a suitable platform for smart mobile device users to generate and share contents seamlessly without the requirement of a centralized server. This feature is particularly important for places that lack Internet coverage such as tourist attractions where users can form an ad-hoc network and communicate opportunistically to share contents. Existing DCS approaches when applied for such type of places suffer from low delivery success rate and high latency. Although a handful of recent approaches have specifically targeted improvement of content delivery service in tourist spot like scenario, these and other DCS approaches do not focus on contents' demand and supply which vary considerably due to visitor in-and-out flow and occurrence of influencing events. This is further compounded by the lack of any content distribution (replication) scheme. The content delivery service will be improved if contents can be proactively distributed in strategic positions based on dynamic demand and supply and medium access contention. In this paper, we propose a dynamic content distribution scheme (DCDS) considering these practical issues for sharing contents in tourist attractions. Simulation results show that the proposed approach significantly improves (7 ∼ 32%) delivery performance.