Cache-Based Content Delivery in Opportunistic Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Over the last few years, multimedia content sharing through different service providers have gained popularity among the Internet users. The development of wireless mobile devices with enhanced features have further fueled this phenomenon. While such content sharing in Internet is accommodated through an overlay architecture, for infrastructure-less environment such as wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) experiencing intermittent connectivity, the distribution mechanism is not that straightforward. Arising from inherent MANET limitations such as short radio transmission range, sporadic node densities and constrained power, intermittent connectivity limits the ability of the network to provide successful content delivery. Although some solutions have been proposed in literature, they fail to consider the mobility characteristics of nodes for making decisions regarding the caching of contents for future delivery. Moreover, user-centric service requirements are also not addressed where different subscribers prefer different content profiles. To address this issue, a novel content sharing framework with optimized caching strategy is proposed in this paper. Based on the cached subscription profiles, the framework exploits two decision-making technologies namely analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and grey relational analysis (GRA) to evaluate all possible content requests between two meeting nodes and subsequently request the preferred contents for future encounters. Simulation results validate the improved performance of the proposed distribution framework in comparison to the existing schemes.