To Share or Not to Share Storage in Mesh Networks: A System Throughput Perspective

While the cost per megabyte of storage is economical, sharing storage might be expensive because delivery of a clip occupying the shared storage requires bandwidth. This is especially true for mesh networks where devices are constrained by the radio-range and bandwidth of their wireless networking card. Assuming a device, termed a peer, is configured with a mass storage device, it may share either all, a fraction, or none of its storage. When a peer does not shares its storage, it stores clips with the objective to enhance a local criterion such as number of clip requests serviced using its mass storage device. When a peer shares its storage, it may store clips to optimize a global metric such as the total number of devices that may display their clips simultaneously, termed system throughput. Using this global metric, we show the following surprising result: the throughput of certain mesh networks is enhanced when peers do not share storage. By understanding these tradeoffs, one may design adaptable software to enable a peer to monitor its environment and decide to share or not to share its storage. We demonstrate the feasibility of such a design using a simulation study.