Lightweight autonomic dissemination of entertainment services in widescale wireless environments

Abstract

The spread of wireless portable devices is opening new market opportunities to provide entertainment services to a growing number of potential users. A notable deployment scenario is represented by limited spatial regions, such as stadiums, railway stations, and airports, with a high number of simultaneously present mobile wireless peers (dense MANETs). The provisioning of entertainment services (e.g., the distribution of news, movie trailers, songs, and game components) in dense MANETs is a challenging task, hard to achieve in a scalable way with traditional static network infrastructures. We propose lightweight autonomic dissemination of entertainment services that exploits impromptu collaborations among mobile wireless peers to replicate resources in an efficient and lazily consistent way. In particular, we have developed the REDMAN middleware to manage, retrieve, and disseminate replicas of data/service components transparently from the point of view of service developers, thus facilitating the realization of widescale entertainment services. REDMAN implements novel lightweight solutions to identify dense MANETs, maintain the desired resource replication degree, and efficiently perform resource retrieval, by exploiting the assumptions of relatively high and almost constant node density to achieve scalability and limited network overhead.