On the sensitivity of geo-based content sharing to location errors

A number of opportunistic content sharing services were developed that exploit device-to-device contacts for infrastructure-less operation. All of them depend, like geo-based ad-hoc routing protocols, on mobile devices knowing their respective positions to accurately perform data replication. In this paper, we explore the impact of different types of location errors on the performance of such a service. We use a GPS error distribution for mobiles derived from real-world measurements, consider different frequencies for GPS readings, and account for only subsets of mobile devices actively using GPS. We carry out extensive simulation studies using synthetic mobility models as well as real-world traces to assess the impact of different types of errors. We find that, overall, opportunistic content sharing is quite robust provided that a sufficient number of nodes support GPS and allow the others to have a rough estimate of where they are. Whether or not the GPS position is prone to errors affects some scenarios and is almost negligible in others.