Performance analysis of cooperative content distribution in wireless ad hoc networks

In this paper we focus on the problem of content distribution in wireless ad hoc networks. Our goal is to study the performance of a cooperative content distribution mechanism to distribute content from one source to a potentially large number of destinations. Despite the large literature on content distribution schemes available for wired settings we argue that the very nature of the underlying ad hoc network poses new challenges that cannot be addressed with current schemes. We propose a cooperative peer-to-peer scheme that allows parallel download of the content based on swarming protocols. Our scheme builds a distribution overlay network that takes into account traffic locality and allows peers to trade parts of the content while sustaining cooperation. We evaluate through simulations the performance of our scheme for different static scenarios using a variety of metrics to characterize the impact of our solution at different layers of the system stack. Our results highlight the great benefits of our solution in terms of system fairness, achievable throughput, and energy consumption. We also study the scalability properties of our solution under the extended network model