Exploiting Schelling behavior for improving data accessibility in mobile peer-to-peer networks

In 1969, Thomas Schelling proposed one of the most cited models in economics to explain how similar people (e.g. people with the same race, education, community) group together in American neighborhoods. Interestingly, we observe that the analogy of this model indeed exists in numerous real world scenarios where co-located people communicate via their personal wireless devices (e.g. cell phones, PDAs, Zune) in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) fashion. Schelling’s model therefore can potentially serve as a mobility model and offer a unique opportunity to efficiently disseminate messages in mobile P2P networks. In this paper, we exploit the natural grouping behaviors of humans presented by Schelling to expedite data dissemination in such networks. Particularly, we design a push-based scheme for dense network areas to maximize query hit and a pull-based scheme for sparse network areas to utilize network bandwidth. We ensure that our scheme is lightweight since query and response are automatically l...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: MOBIQUITOUS
• Authors: Long Vu, Klara Nahrstedt, Matthias Hollick
• Keywords: Communications, Data Dissemination, MOBIQUITOUS 2008, Query Hit, Similar People