Exploiting graph partitioning for hierarchical replica placement in WMNs

Content replication has gained much popularity in recent years both in the wired and wireless infrastructures. A key challenge faced by Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) is to determine the number and locations of content replicas (e.g. video clip) such that the mesh clients access cost is minimized. Furthermore, the dynamic nature of the wireless environment favors a distributed and adaptive solution to this problem. In this paper, we present an efficient, lightweight and scalable object replication and placement scheme for WMNs. Since the placement problem is NP-Complete, the scheme decomposes the problem into smaller sub-problems to facilitate the distributed approach in a P2P fashion. Moreover, it exploits the long-term link-quality routing metrics to augment the replica placement decision and the instantaneous link-quality metrics for replica server selection. The effectiveness of our scheme is evaluated through extensive simulation studies.