A Middleware for Opportunistic Content Distribution

In this work we present a middleware architecture for a mobile peer-to-peer content distribution system. Our architecture allows wireless content dissemination between mobile nodes without relying on infrastructure support. In addition, it supports the dissemination of contents between the wireless ad-hoc domain and the wired Internet. In the ad-hoc domain, contents are exchanged opportunistically when nodes are in communication range. Applications access the service of our platform through a publish/subscribe interface and therefore do not have to deal with low-level opportunistic networking issues such as beaconing, service discovery, connection setup and matching or soliciting contents. Our middleware consists of three key components. A content structure that facilitates dividing contents into logical topics and allows efficient matching of content lookups and downloading under sporadic node connectivity. A solicitation protocol that allows nodes to solicit content meta-information in order to discover contents available at a neighboring node and to download content entries disjointedly from different nodes. An API that allows applications to access the system services through a publish/subscribe interface. In this work we present the design and implementation of our middleware and describe a set of applications that use the services provided by our middleware. We also assess the performance of the system using our Android implementation as well as a simulation implementation for large-scale evaluation.