Premium
Design and performance evaluation of a mechanism to share contents over broadcast channels
Author(s) -
Di Sorte Dario,
Femminella Mauro,
Reali Gianluca
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
international journal of communication systems
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.344
H-Index - 49
eISSN - 1099-1131
pISSN - 1074-5351
DOI - 10.1002/dac.893
Subject(s) - computer science , computer network , latency (audio) , proxy (statistics) , bandwidth (computing) , architecture , telecommunications , art , machine learning , visual arts
Abstract In this paper, we present a novel mechanism (Wireless Data Sharing, WDS) to share popular contents between a set of second‐level (children) proxies connected to a parent proxy by means of a bandwidth‐limited, wireless, broadcast channel. The idea is as follows: when one of the children proxies requests a content from the parent proxy, the parent publishes the transmission of this content over a specific TCP connection between itself and the requesting child, so as to enable all the other children to capture it. Finally, the parent starts transmitting the content and the children may listen to the broadcast channel and sniff the content from the TCP connection. This allows users served by these proxies to decrease the time to access contents, without any additional bandwidth consumption. Furthermore, such a mechanism is able to decrease the load of the parent proxy. This work provides a detailed description of the architecture and functions of the WDS system, with explicit reference to the prototype we implemented. This prototype enabled us to evaluate the performance of the data sharing mechanism from both user and network viewpoints. In this regard, we carried out a measurement campaign in an IEEE 802.11 environment to evaluate the performance of the mechanism quantitatively. The results show that the WDS system guarantees not only bandwidth saving, but also lower content access latency with respect to the legacy proxy hierarchy system. In addition, the signalling overhead associated with the publishing mechanism proves to be very low. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.