Floating Content Research Articles

Adaptive Probabilistic Broadcasting for Floating Content

Floating Content (FC) is emerged by bounded geographical zone in a mobile ad hoc network (MANET) to live in the anchor zone (AZ) for special applications such as emergency messages and traffic information for some time. To improve the availability, accessibility and reduce the number of FC duplication, the adaptive probabilistic broadcasting for FC (APFC) based on the number of neighbours and the informed node location is proposed. When a node without FC enters the transmission radius of informed node that is with FC. By exchanged message with the new node, the informed node obtains the information of the new node and its own neighbours. The informed node calculates the transmission probability p based on the collected neighbour information. Then the node automatically selects whether to use APFC or broadcast the FC according to the current position. The algorithm is simulated in different randomly networks. The results show that this algorithm outperforms other broadcasting algorithms in FC duplication.

Storage Capacity of Opportunistic Information Dissemination Systems

Floating Content (FC) is a paradigm for localized infrastructure-less content dissemination, that aims at sharing information among nodes within a restricted geographical area by relying only on opportunistic content exchanges. FC provides the basis for the probabilistic spatial storage of shared information in a completely decentralized fashion, usually without support from dedicated infrastructure. One of the key open issues in FC is the characterization of its performance limits as functions of the system parameters, accounting for its reliance on volatile wireless exchanges and on limited user resources. This paper takes a first step towards tackling this issue, by elaborating a model for the storage capacity of FC, i.e., for the maximum amount of information that can be stored through the FC paradigm. The storage capacity of FC, and of similar probabilistic content dissemination systems, is evaluated with a powerful information theoretical approach, based on a mean field model of opportunistic information exchange. In addition, an extremely simple explicit approximate expression for storage capacity is derived. The numerical results generated by our analytical models are compared to the predictions of realistic simulations under different setups, proving the accuracy of our analytical approaches, and characterizing the properties of the FC storage capacity.

Floating Content: Experiences and Future Directions

Floating content is a promising communication paradigm based on pure ad hoc communications. It has a huge usage potential for various context-aware applications. In this paper, recent research related to floating content communication paradigm is presented. This paper focuses on some of the vital experiences ranging from analytical models to simulations to the real-world implementations. Some important results on the performance of floating content based on analytical models, simulations, and real-world implementations are presented. These results not only show the usefulness of the existing analytical models but also explain the ways of extending these existing models for incorporating new communication technologies and mobility models. This paper also highlights the energy consumption of smartphone applications based on floating content and explains how new communication technologies impact the feasibility of using floating content as a communication service for different applications. Based on the experiences, new future directions are highlighted that can prove to be very beneficial for researchers investigating this area.

Optimal strategies for floating anchored information with partial infrastructure support

Floating Content (FC) is a communication paradigm to locally share ephemeral content without direct support from infrastructure. It is based on constraining the opportunistic replication of content in a way that strikes a balance between minimizing resource usage and maximizing content availability among the intended recipients. However, existing approaches to management of FC schemes are unfit for realistic scenarios with non-uniform user distributions, resulting in heavy overdimensioning of resources allocated to FC. In this work, we propose a new version of FC, called Cellular Floating Content (CFC), which optimizes the use of bandwidth and memory by adapting the content replication and storage strategies to the spatial distribution of users, and to their mobility patterns. The main idea underlying our approach is to partition users into small “local communities”, and to optimally weight their contributions to the FC paradigm according to their specific mobility features, and to the resources required to achieve a target performance level. We characterize numerically the properties of the optimal strategies in a variety of mobility patterns and traffic conditions, showing the accuracy of our approach, and the significant savings it enables in the amount of resources necessary to run FC, which in a realistic setup can be as high as 27% with respect to traditional FC dimensioning strategies.

A Deep Learning Strategy for Vehicular Floating Content Management

Floating Content (FC) is a communication paradigm for the local dissemination of contextualized information through D2D connectivity, in a way which minimizes the use of resources while achieving some specified performance target. Existing approaches to FC dimensioning are based on unrealistic system assumptions that make them, highly inaccurate and overly conservative when applied in realistic settings. In this paper, we present a first step towards the development of a cognitive approach to efficient dynamic management of FC. We propose a deep learning strategy for FC dimensioning, which exploits a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to efficiently modulate over time the resources employed by FC in a QoS-aware manner. Numerical evaluations show that our approach achieves a maximum rejection rate of 3%, and resource savings of 37.5% with respect to the benchmark strategy.

Analytical models of floating content in a vehicular urban environment

Among the many proposed opportunistic content sharing schemes, Floating Content (FC) is of special interest for the vehicular environment, not only for cellular traffic offloading, but also as a natural communication paradigm for location-based context-aware vehicular applications. Previously published results on the performance of vehicular FC have mostly focused on the conditions under which content persists over time in a given region of space, without addressing other important aspects of vehicular FC performance, such as the effectiveness with which content is replicated and made available, and the system conditions that enable good FC performance. This work presents a first analytical model of FC performance in vehicular networks in urban settings. It is based on a new synthetic mobility model (called District Mobility Model - DMM), and it does not require a detailed knowledge of the road grid geometry. We validate our model extensively, by comparison against numerical simulations based on real-world traces, and we prove our model accuracy under a variety of mobility patterns and traffic conditions. Our analytical and simulation results provide evidence of the effectiveness of theFC paradigm in realistic urban settings over a wide range of traffic conditions.

Stop and forward: Opportunistic local information sharing under walking mobility

In this paper we study an opportunistic geographically constrained information sharing paradigm known under the name Floating Content (FC), considering two different mobility models that describe the behavior of pedestrians. We assume that users carrying their smartphones walk from one location to another and then stop for a while. Information transfers take place in the periods when users pause between movements. We develop analytical models to compute the performance metrics that characterize FC in this case and we validate analytical results with data collected during an experiment performed in a university campus. The comparison proves the accuracy of our analytical models. Moreover, results unveil the key relevance for FC performance of group dynamics in user movements.

A Multi-Pronged Approach to Adaptive and Context Aware Content Dissemination in VANETs

Content dissemination in Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) has the potential to enable a myriad of applications, ranging from advertising, traffic and emergency warnings to infotainment. This variety in applications and services calls for mechanisms able to optimize content storing, retrieval and forwarding among vehicles, without jeopardizing network resources. Content Centric Networking (CCN), takes advantage of inherent content redundancy in the network in order to decrease the utilization of network resources, improve response time and content availability, coping efficiently with some of the effects of mobility. Floating Content (FC), on the other hand, holds potential to implement efficiently a large amount of vehicular applications thanks to its property of geographic content replication, while Software Defined Networking (SDN), is an attractive solution for the lack of flexibility and dynamic programmability that characterizes current VANET architectures. By implementing a logical centralization of the network, SDN enables dynamic and efficient management of network resources. In this paper, for a few reference scenarios, we illustrate how approaches that combine CCN, FC and SDN enable an innovative adaptive VANET architecture able to efficiently accommodate to intermittent connectivity, fluctuating node density and mobility patterns on one side and application performance and network resources on the other side, aiming to achieve high QoS. For each scenario, we highlight the main open research challenges, and we describe possible solutions to improve content dissemination and reduce replication without affecting content availability.

Experimenting with floating content in an office setting

The growing ubiquity and pervasiveness of sensors and smart devices, with the consequent availability of a large amount of local and contextualized information, are giving rise to a wealth of applications and services. In this work we consider an opportunistic communication scheme called Floating Content (FC), which was specifically designed for serverless distributed context-aware applications. So far, the performance analysis of FC, and in particular of content lifetime and availability, was based on simplified system models and fluid system analysis. The resulting performance estimates did not account for the effects of propagation characteristics, mobility patterns, and communication protocols, all factors known to significantly affect the performance of opportunistic communication schemes. This article studies the main issues related to the performance of FC service in a realistic office setting through a first experimental evaluation of a mobile app for Android devices. Our experimental results confirm the feasibility of FC service for supporting practical context-aware mobile applications in office settings.