Exploiting Schelling behavior for improving data accessibility in mobile peer-to-peer networks
Long Vu, Klara Nahrstedt, Matthias Hollick · 2008
In 1969, Thomas Schelling proposed one of the most cited models in economics to explain how similar people (e.g. peo-ple with the same race, education, community) group to-gether in American neighborhoods. Interestingly, we ob-serve that the analogies of this model indeed exist in nu-merous scenarios where co-located people communicate via their personal wireless devices in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fash-ion. Schelling’s model therefore can potentially serve as a mobility model and offer a unique opportunity to efficiently disseminate messages in mobile P2P networks. In this pa-per, we exploit the natural grouping and moving behavior of humans presented by Schelling to expedite data dissem-ination in such networks. Particularly, we design a push model for dense network areas to maximize data dissemi-nation and a pull model for sparse network areas to utilize network bandwidth and node energy efficiently. We ensure that our scheme is lightweight since queries and responses are automatically limited within groups of mobile nodes car-ried by similar people. Moreover, we avoid broadcast storms by assigning each message a broadcast timer and applying overhearing mechanism to reduce redundant transmissions. Finally, our simulation results show that the proposed data dissemination scheme improves the query hit ratio signifi-cantly while utilizing network bandwidth efficiently. 1.