Peer-to-Peer Content Multicast Using Off-Peak Periods in Wireless Access Links

Recently, many kinds of content are being circulated within a great many service-specific overlay networks. When the content is not extremely delay-sensitive, content circulation between wireless terminals can be realized without additional resources by using off-peak periods in wireless access links. In such content circulation, peer-to-peer content multicast is a promising approach to reduce the load on the centralized server. However, to minimize battery drain, each wireless terminal can only forward content to a restricted number of neighboring terminals once it has received the content. This paper proposes an efficient forwarding scheme for peer-to-peer content multicast between the wireless terminals intermittently connected with the backhaul network. In the proposed scheme, a restricted number of terminals with an earlier start time of off-peak periods are selected to forward the content when the number of forwarding hops from the source terminal is less than or equal to a predetermined threshold. In contrast, a restricted number of terminals are selected randomly when the number of forwarding hops exceeds the threshold. This paper clarifies that the proposed hybrid forwarding scheme can multicast the content to many terminals within an arbitrarily restricted period. A guideline to determine the optimum threshold for switching the terminal selection method in the proposed hybrid scheme is derived from simulation results.