Delay Tolerant Collaborations among Campus-Wide Wireless Users

The ubiquitous deployment of wireless LAN networks are allowing students to embrace laptops as their preferred computing platform. We investigated the viability of building collaborative applications to share contents amongst student groups. In our application scenario, the university will provide wireless infrastructure throughout the campus but not the storage infrastructure required to store the shared contents. Laptops will likely exhibit weak availability. Hence, these collaborative applications need to tolerate long delays in propagating updates amongst the participants. In this paper, we presented a preliminary analysis of message forwarding behavior under realistically resource constrained node scenarios. Our experiments were based on the observed wireless user behavior at the University of Notre Dame. Our experiments showed the inherent limits of epidemic propagation in real campus wireless network scenarios.