Group-Purchase Scheme for Content Dissemination in Opportunistic Networks

Content dissemination in opportunistic networks has attracted much attention in recent years. A critical challenge associated with content dissemination in opportunistic networks is delay optimization. We discover that the address-based content dissemination is a major reason for delays because one message travels to one node at a time. We further discover that a message sometimes does not reach subscribers because nodes are sparse in opportunistic networks. Motivated by group purchase online, we propose a group-purchase scheme (GPSCH) to solve this problem. In GPSCH, nodes participate in group purchase to subscribe for messages, whereas message carriers publish messages to nodes upon subscription. In addition, we study the communication probabilities between messages and nodes to forward messages. We also provide a delay analysis of our proposed scheme. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the GPSCH performs well in reducing delay time, by at least 75%, compared with typical routing schemes.