Optimal Channel Choice for Collaborative Ad-Hoc Dissemination

Collaborative ad-hoc dissemination of information has been proposed as an efficient means to disseminate information among devices in a wireless ad-hoc network. Devices help in forwarding the information channels to the entire network, by disseminating the channels they subscribe to, plus others. The authors consider the case where devices have a limited amount of storage that they are willing to devote to the public good, and thus have to decide which channels they are willing to help disseminate. They are interested in finding channel selection strategies which optimize the dissemination time across the channels. They first consider a simple model under the random mixing assumption; they show that channel dissemination time can be characterized in terms of the number of nodes that forward this channel.