Delay-tolerant delivery of quality information in ad hoc networks

We investigate the delivery of information in ad hoc networks. We consider information sources and information consumers, and the network in between. Information has a certain quality indicator that fades over time. Consumers (applications that process incoming data) can receive and process disseminated information from its generation time until the associated quality reaches the lowest possible level. We adopt optimal stopping theory and an optimal online search algorithm in order to study the problem of optimally scheduling information consumption. The assumptions of our study include an efficient epidemic information dissemination scheme, which is a popular scheme for wireless sensor networks nowadays. We adopt the latter scheme for a combined setting where receiving nodes delay the reporting of information to applications in search for better quality while the overall network optimizes transmissions through the epidemic abstraction. Our findings are quite promising for the engineering of delay-tolerant applications (and the relevant middleware) in ad hoc networks. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.