Simple Approximate Analysis of Floating Content for Context-Aware Applications

Abstract

Context-awareness is a peculiar characteristic of an ever expanding set of applications that make use of a combination of restricted spatio-temporal locality and mobile communications, to deliver a variety of services to the end user. Communication requirements for context-aware applications significantly differ from those of ordinary applications; opportunistic communications are extremely well-suited to them, because they naturally incorporate context. Recently, an opportunistic communication paradigm called "Floating Content" was proposed, which is conceived to support serverless, distributed content sharing. In this work, we present a simple (in that it uses few primitive system parameters), approximate analytical model for the performance analysis of context-aware applications that use floating content. From a system design perspective, our analysis can be used to tune key system parameters so as to achieve the desired application performance. In particular, we apply our analysis to estimate the "success probability" for two representative categories of context-aware applications, and show how the system can be configured to achieve the application’s target. In order to complement our analytical study, we validate our model using extensive simulations under different settings and mobility patterns. Our simulation results show that our model-based predictions are indeed highly accurate under a wide range of conditions.