A Lightweight Distributed Solution to Content Replication in Mobile Networks

Performance and reliability of content access in mobile networks is conditioned jointly by the number and location of content replicas deployed at the network nodes. The endeavour of this work is to address such an optimization problem with a distributed, lightweight solution that handles network dynamics. We devise a mechanism that lets nodes share the burden of storing and providing content, so as to achieve load balancing, and decide whether to replicate or drop the information so as to adapt to a dynamic content demand and time-varying topology. Simulation results show that our mechanism, which uses local measurements only, is: (i) extremely precise in approximating an optimal solution to content placement and replication; (ii) robust against network mobility; (iii) flexible in accommodating variation in time and space of the content demand.