Green content distribution in Wireless Mesh Networks with infrastructure support

We consider the problem of energy consumption in sharing a viral file between peers over a wireless community network (e.g., students in campus). Wireless community networks such as Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have been accepted as a new communication approach that enables users to share the network resources and reduce the cost of the Internet access. The common paradigm for sharing content between users in a community network is through the use of a centralized server. Another scheme is to exploit the upload capacity of peers who are interested in the same content (e.g., Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing). In this paper, we consider a content distribution setting in a wireless mesh network wherein a number of infrastructure nodes (mesh routers) support the P2P content sharing and act as caches and participants. We model the performance of this content distribution scheme, and analytically compute the energy that is consumed in the network when a viral P2P object is shared between the peers in a WMN. We compare the energy consumption with the centralized server scheme using both numerical results and detailed simulations. The results shows significant reduction in energy consumption (more than an order of magnitude) when only few replicas of the object is cached at the infrastructure nodes.