Ad-hoc content dissemination protocol based on monetary economy

Abstract

In most of research works on the wireless ad-hoc network, it is often assumed that all nodes in the network are cooperative to relay packets. However in the ad-hoc network between persons which will be widely deployed following the ubiquitous computing environment, since the mobile nodes belong to different persons, they do not have the responsibility to relay packets. For this noncooperative situation, a framework which stimulates the nodes to mutually cooperate is proposed in [9]. In addition to the mutual cooperation, due to the characteristics of the data diversity the framework has, it is possible that lots of simultaneous disseminations of the content occur over the whole network area. It was shown that the framework utilizes more net capacity of the network than the multi-hop cooperative ad-hoc network does by exploiting the data diversity and eliminating a redundant bandwidth waste for the multi-hop packet relays. However, the framework has large variance on content dissemination time and low dissemination rate at the beginning and ending of the dissemination according to the mobility of the nodes. Moreover, the system model used for analysis is unrealistic. We propose an ad-hoc content dissemination protocol based on monetary economy to enhance the content dissemination rate and reduce the variance of the dissemination time by introducing a currency. We show that our protocol outperforms the previous one through the simulations and our system model is more realistic and precise. We expect that the monetary economy in the ad-hoc network would evolve rapidly as it did in the human society with the various usage of a currency that we have suggested in the paper.