Experimenting with floating content in an office setting

The growing ubiquity and pervasiveness of sensors and smart devices, with the consequent availability of a large amount of "local" and contextualized information, are giving rise to a wealth of "context-aware" applications and services. In this work we consider an opportunistic communication scheme called Floating Content (FC), which was specifically designed for serverless distributed context-aware applications. So far, the performance analysis of FC, and in particular of content lifetime and availability, was based on simplified system models and fluid system analysis. The resulting performance estimates did not account for the effects of propagation characteristics, mobility patterns, and communication protocols, all factors known to significantly affect the performance of opportunistic communication schemes. This article studies the main issues related to the performance of FC service in a realistic office setting through a first experimental evaluation of a mobile app for Android devices. Our experimental results confirm the feasibility of FC service for supporting practical context-aware mobile applications in office settings.