P2P multicast for pervasive ad hoc networks

During the last few years, the proliferation of miniaturised devices with networking capabilities has provided the technological grounds for pervasive networking environments. It is not visionary to foresee a world of pervasive devices embedded in the environment interacting between them, and with those carried by users, via wireless communications. In addition, fostered by the diffusion of small-size, computational-rich mobile devices, the way content is generated, and accessed is changing with respect to the legacy-Internet paradigm. An ever-increasing share of the Internet content is generated directly by the users, and shared on the network (following the User-Generated Content model). While today the legacy Internet is still used to share user-generated content, it is reasonable to envision that pervasive networking technologies will represent the natural platform to support this new model. This will result in content being distributed on users’ devices rather than on centralised servers on the Internet, and in users creating ad hoc networks to share content. The p2p paradigm is particularly suitable for this scenario, because communications will occur directly among users, instead of being necessarily mediated by centralised servers. Motivated by these remarks, in this work we focus on p2p multicast services over ad hoc networks aimed at sharing content among groups of users interested in the same topics. Specifically, starting from a reference solution in legacy wired networks (Scribe), we design a cross-layer optimised protocol (XScribe) that addresses most of the Scribe problems on ad hoc networks. XScribe exploits cross-layer interactions with a proactive routing protocol to manage group membership. Furthermore, it uses a lightweight, structureless approach to deliver data to group members. By jointly using experimental results and analytical models, we show that, with respect to Scribe, XScribe significantly reduces the packet loss and the delay experienced by multicast receivers, and increases the maximum throughput that can be delivered to multicast groups.