Codec: Content Distribution with (n,k) Erasure Code in Manet

The advent of smart phones has further expanded the horizon of communicative technologies. Now through the smart mobile devices, people can access and download the required data from the internet more conveniently. Many users might be interested in the same information at the same time from some hot spots. However, the respective base station may not be able to meet the demands of so many high-speed downloads at the same time, due to constraints of base station bandwidth and costs. Therefore, we present a novel content distribution system named ‘CoDEC’, which uses the mutual cooperation of mobile terminals by their short-range communication to implement highly efficient content distribution. The main techniques used in CoDEC are single-hop communication, (n,k) erasure code and nodes classification, which divides mobile nodes into storage nodes and normal nodes. The storage nodes can distribute coded frames, generated from the base station to the other nodes, corresponding to their requests which will save the bandwidth allocation of base station. The numerical results of simulation shows that CoDEC allows less encoding count, shorter file downloading delays compared to an existing file swarming protocol CodeTorrent.