P2P cache-and-forward mechanisms for mobile ad hoc networks

We investigate the problem of spreading information contents in a wireless ad hoc network. In our vision, information dissemination should satisfy the following requirements: (i) it should result in a desirable distribution of information replicas in the network and (ii) the information should be evenly and fairly carried by all nodes in their turn. In this paper, we show that these goals can be achieved by simple cache-and-forward mechanisms inspired by well-known node mobility models, provided that a sufficient number of information replicas are injected into the network. The proposed approach works under different network scenarios, is fully distributed and comes at a very low cost in terms of protocol overhead.