On Updated Data Dissemination Exploiting an Epidemic Model in Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

In ad hoc networks, it is effective that each mobile host creates replicas of data items held by other mobile hosts for improving data accessibility. In our previous work, we assumed an environment where data items are updated and proposed two updated data dissemination methods which efficiently update old replicas. In these methods, the communication traffic is large since every mobile host necessarily requests updated data items when it knows that its own replicas are old. In this paper, we propose an updated data dissemination method exploiting an epidemic model, which is a popular bio-inspired approach, for reducing the communication traffic. In our proposed method, mobile hosts disseminate invalidation reports and discard old replicas when a mobile host updates a data item or when two mobile hosts are connected with each other. Each mobile host which discards an old replica requests the updated data item with a certain probability. We also present simulation results to evaluate the performance of our proposed method.