Middleware for semantic multicast in spontaneous multi-hop networks

Spontaneous Multi-hop Networks (SMNs) are emerging as a novel networking and communication paradigm, strongly pushed by the widespread availability of smartphones equipped with heterogeneous wireless connectivity and powerful computing capabilities. SMN nodes can opportunistically exploit peer-to-peer contacts to seamlessly share resources/content in an impromptu and transient way. The paper presents a novel 3-layer modeling abstraction for multicast in SMNs, in order to characterize the different kinds of possible inter-node interaction based on different degrees of expressiveness and social-aware collaboration. In addition, we originally present the design and implementation of some novel semantic-based multicast mechanisms that efficiently target SMN nodes based on user interests and that are integrated into our SMN middleware solution. First preliminary results show the feasibility of the approach and its limited overhead. © 2013 ICST Institute for Computer Science, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.