Ant-Inspired Mini-Community-Based Solution for Video-On-Demand Services in Wireless Mobile Networks

Highly efficient distribution and management of media resources and fast content discovery are key determinants for mobile peer-to-peer video-on-demand solutions, especially in wireless mobile networks. Virtual communities making use of users´ common characteristics such as interest and interaction to describe the boundary of sharing content and objects are a promising avenue for high-efficiency resource sharing. In this paper, we propose a novel ant-inspired mini-community-based video sharing solution for on-demand streaming services in wireless mobile networks (AMCV). AMCV relies on a newly designed two layer architecture and on an algorithm inspired from the indirect communication between ants via pheromone trails which enables them to discover and use shortest paths. The architecture is composed of a mini-community network layer and a community member layer. The ant-inspired algorithm enables finding the common interest of users in video content within large amounts of pseudo disorderly interactive behavior data. AMCV proposes an ant colony optimization-based community communication strategy that dynamically bridges communities to support fast search for resources. AMCV achieves high scalability by making use of a designed community maintenance mechanism to uniformly distribute the maintenance cost of members and resources in the community, according to various member roles. Simulation-based testing shows how AMCV outperforms another state-of- the-art solution in terms of a wide set of performance metrics.