Take your time, get it closer: content dissemination within mobile pedestrian crowds

Abstract

The explosion of traffic demands in the edge of the Internet, mostly by mobile users, is putting under pressure current networking infrastructures. 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 edge computing, and in particular, on mechanisms to offload or address locally part of the user injected traffic at the access infrastructure, thus reducing the need of Internet requests and retrievals. This paper concentrates on the ability of mobile crowds –and corresponding access networks—to fulfill content requests originated within the mesh, with minimal intervention of the Internet infrastructure. Simple heuristics are revisited, proposed, discussed and evaluated to improve autonomous content discovery and dissemination within high-density, low-mobility crowds, by combining notions already explored for MANET routing: deliberate jittering and autonomous distance-based overlay pruning. Results over synthetic networks and real mobility traces indicate that these mechanisms improve efficiency and quality of content request discoveries, by reducing significantly collisions and increasing stability of discovered paths in dense pedestrian crowds.