Publication: Performance evaluation of floating content for context-aware applications
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Publication date
2014-09
Defense date
2014-10-21
Authors
Tutors
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Abstract
Context-awareness is a peculiar characteristic of an expanding set of applications that
make use of a combination of restricted spatio-temporal locality and mobile communications,
to deliver a variety of services. Opportunistic communications satisfy well the
communication requirements of these applications, because they naturally incorporate
context. Recently, an opportunistic communication paradigm called "Floating Content"
was proposed, to support infrastructure-less, distributed content sharing. It aims at ensuring
the availability of data within a certain geographic area called "anchor zone". In
literature, the focus was on understanding the asymptotic properties of the floating lifetime,
i.e., the duration of time for which content floats in the anchor zone. Instead, our
objective is to characterize the performance of context-aware applications using floating
content as a communication service.
First, we present a simple approximate analytical model for accessing the viability of
floating content to act as a communication service for context-aware applications. We
focus on the "success probability", which captures the likelihood for a user to receive the
content when traversing the anchor zone and apply our analysis to estimate the success
probability for three representative categories of context-aware applications, and show
how the system can be configured to achieve the application’s target.
Second, we investigate the impact of different mobility models on the performance of
context-aware applications that use floating content. In particular, we consider four different
mobility models, and, by using extensive simulation experiments, we investigate the performance of three different categories of context-aware applications. By comparing
the simulation results to the performance predictions of our previously proposed
simple analytical model, we show that our model can provide useful performance predictions
even for complex and realistic mobility models. Simulation results under different
mobility models also confirm the viability of floating content to act as a communication
service for a variety of context-aware applications.
Finally, we investigate the performance of floating content in a real world setting by
developing and deploying an Android mobile application based on floating content in an office and a university campus environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is
the first ever experimental evaluation of floating content service in a real setting. Our
results provide quite interesting indications for the viability and the implementation of
applications using floating content in the considered environments. We also propose a
novel simple analytical model that accounts for the peculiarities of the mobility patterns
in such a real world setting, and that can accurately predict the effectiveness of floating
content for the implementation of context-aware applications in an office and a campus
setting.
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Keywords
Context-aware, Floating content, Mobile communications