Content-update process performance under energy saving schemes in mobile opportunistic networks

Mobile hand-held devices such as smart-phones and tablets have gained in popularity over recent years. However, this induces cellular networks to suffer severe traffic demands that are hard to accommodate. In this respect, utilizing the ad-hoc communication of devices (e.g., bluetooth) can be an alternative way to obtain information while reducing the network overhead. Until now, the application possibility has been studied in Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs). In the research, `contacts´ are important In the sense of supporting content delivery chances. For energy-saving, mobile devices can utilize a sleep/awake control in that their energy is constrained due to battery operations. This reminds us that the contact-based MANET research is not enough because the information delivery opportunities are limited to contacts among awake devices. In a network modeling procedure, we consider the sleep/awake rules of devices and investigate their effects on performance measures. Specifically, we estimate the performance of a content update process under the device sleep/awake. This process is adequate to the dissemination of `age-sensitive´ contents such as news, tweets or traffic information. In there, one information provider continuously generates content and mobile users keep updating the more recently generated content through opportunistic contacts. Depending on the sleep/awake rule of devices, we analyze the degree of content freshness that users achieve and propose a normalization method to compare the performance of different rules. Also, we validate our analysis from real-trace tests.