A mobility-aware approach for maintaining data consistency in unstructured mobile P2P systems

Abstract

In unstructured mobile peer-to-peer systems (MP2P), the frequent link breakages lead frequent topology mismatching problems and data transmission failures due to high mobility of nodes. The overhead of data transmission and synchronization cannot be neglected. In order to keep the data consistent, flooding is a fundamental and straightforward data synchronization mechanism since a mobile node doesn't know which else has the same shared data item. However, data flooding causes the broadcast storm problem. In this paper, we propose a mobility-aware data update approach (MADU) to improve the data dissemination and to reduce the overhead of maintaining the consistency of shared data items in an MP2P network. We use safe-time which is derived from the neighbor's location and speed to determine the time for a node to do the checking and updating between the neighbor nodes and itself. We also consider the mobile nodes connectivity and access frequency of a data item as the factors to trigger the update process. By combining the mobility information of nodes, network connectivity, and access frequency of data items, we set a reasonable data update mechanism, which can significantly decrease the number of retransmissions and redundant messages so as to reduce the overhead of maintaining the data consistency.