Effective opportunistic dissemination of spatio-temporal contents in mobile environments

Dissemination of spatio-temporally valid content from content providers to consumers is critical in certain application contexts as data items could lose their validity across time and space. Content sharing in challenged opportunistic environments remains a research challenge as existing solutions fail to exploit dissemination patterns across spatio-temporal limits. In this paper, we propose spatio-temporal reachability graphs to depict reachability of time-and space-sensitive content in opportunistic mobile environments. Furthermore, we develop an analytical framework to estimate content distribution in such environments and validate its feasibility over long-term datasets. We perform extensive trace-driven simulation studies to determine content dissemination properties of environments with known mobility patterns. The analytical framework estimates dissemination ratio, optimizes parameter setting, and tests transmission capacities of opportunistic environments. Proposed scheme is useful to content providers as well as receivers. (C) 2017 Published by Elsevier B.V.