A Practical and Efficient Overhearing Strategy for Reliable Content Distribution over a Single Hop Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

Nowadays, wireless LAN is equipped in most portable devices and widely deployed, and then we can communicate over wireless link with low cost. However, when the same content is simultaneously downloaded by several terminals with unicast in a wireless LAN, the bandwidth must be divided among the terminals and the download speed is reduced. With using the broadcast nature of wireless media, pseudo multicasting methods, which overhear the unicast flow to realize multicast like communication, have been proposed. In the pseudo multicasting methods, since parts of the content is obtained by overhearing the TCP/UDP flows of a specific content going to other terminals in a wireless LAN, and the server need not send the content for each client repeatedly. These methods enable to realize multicasting with a practical way. However, redundant unicast traffic is still generated because the receivers do not obtain contents via overhearing in an efficient way. Based on the pseudo multicasting, we propose an efficient, flexible and reliable content distribution method over single hop wireless ad hoc network in this paper. In the proposed method a content is divided into pieces and the server distributes it according to the download status of each receivers at the application level. To accelerate downloading, we propose a method for selecting the piece and the terminal for transmission taking the effect of network coding for efficient overhearing. We developed a testbed and confirmed that the proposed scheduling accelerates the download speed even when the communication speed of each terminal is different.