Floating content: Information availability in urban environments

Content sharing via the Internet is a widespread means for people to foster their relationships irrespective of physical distance. While network-based social applications are essential to overcome distances and connect people around the world, relying on infrastructure services for location-aware services may often not be desirable. In this paper, we propose and analyze a fully distributed variant of an ephemeral content sharing service, solely dependent on the mobile devices in the vicinity using principles of opportunistic networking. The net result is a best effort service for floating content in which: 1) information dissemination is geographically limited; 2) the lifetime and spreading of information depends on interested nodes being available; 3) traffic can only be created and caused locally; and 4) content can only be added, but not deleted. We present the general model for floating content and results from our on-going evaluation. Our results show that floating content systems are feasible in scenarios which correspond to typical urban settings, in terms of number of nodes and their density, node mobility, and device capabilities.