Peer-Based Efficient Content Distribution in Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile devices pay the telecommunication cost of downloading Internet data proportional to the amount of data transferred. This paper introduces a special ad hoc network in which several mobile devices, called peers, to cooperate each other to reduce the overall cost to download Internet content. Each peer downloads a specific portion of the content over 3G connection and exchanges the portion with other peers over the ad hoc connection in order that all participating peers are able to reconstruct the whole content. This paper proposes a peer-based content distribution method, and compares its performance with a similar one named per-packet based distribution method. The simulation results indicate that per-peer based method outperforms the per-packet based method. In addition, approximately 90% of the telecommunication cost is saved with as few as 10 peers.