Replica distribution of data associated with location on wireless ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks, due to the change of topology caused by the movement of hosts and the change of radio link status, it is difficult for mobile hosts to retain accessibility to data on other hosts. To solve such a problem, replica distribution methods which distribute replicas of data items to other mobile hosts and maintain them have been proposed. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a method to enhance the accessibility to data items that are associated with locations and requested by Geocast from hosts. This method is based on flooding of replicas of data items, and it uses the locations of mobile hosts and the associated locations of data items for controlling the range of the replications and the redundancy of the replicas. Furthermore, to keep the accessibility to such data high, replicas are dynamically relocated after the movement of hosts. We confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed method by detailed simulations including multiple data request models. Simulation results showed that the proposed method achieves high accessibility to location-dependent data especially when the storage size is small. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 90(10): 67– 80, 2007; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.20320