Data seeding in nomadic cooperative groups

Wireless cooperation is emerging as a viable approach for next generation networks to offer important benefits in terms of content transfer delay, data rate, energy consumption, and cell capacity. One of the possible applications of a wireless user cooperation paradigm is represented by the provision of content sharing services. Data is seeded into a cooperative cluster through cellular links while short-range links are used to distribute data to all the interested nodes. Besides showing the beneficial effects of cooperation, this paper focuses on the best way to seed information into such a cluster of nodes and on a solution offering benefits in terms of either the time or the energy consumption for the service. Starting from static environments, the potentialities offered by an ad-hoc conceived Genetic Algorithm (GA) are shown. The analysis is then extended to the more realistic nomadic environments with low speed pedestrian mobility for the nodes.