Delay tolerant information dissemination via coded cooperative data exchange

In this paper, we introduce a system and a set of algorithms for disseminating popular content to a large group of wireless clients spread over a wide area. This area is partitioned into multiple cells and there is a base station in each cell which is able to broadcast to the clients within its radio coverage. Dissemination of information in the proposed system is hybrid in nature: Each base station broadcasts a fraction of information in the form of random linear combinations of data blocks. Then the clients cooperate by exchanging packets to obtain their desired messages while they are moving arbitrarily over the area. In this paper, fundamental trade-offs between the average information delivery completion time at the clients and different parameters of the system such as bandwidth usage by the base stations, average energy consumption by the clients and the popularity of the spread information are studied. Moreover different heuristic algorithms are proposed to control and maintain a balance over these trade-offs. Also, the more complicated case of multiple sessions where each client is interested in an arbitrary subset of sessions is considered and two variants of the basic dissemination algorithm are proposed. The performance of all the proposed algorithms is evaluated via extensive numerical experiments.