Lightweight Autonomic Dissemination of Entertainment Services in Wide-scale Wireless Environments

The spreading of wireless portable devices is opening new market opportunities to provide entertainment services to a growing number of potential users. A notable deployment scenario is represented by limited spatial regions, such as stadiums, railway stations, and airports, with a high number of simultaneously present mobile wireless peers (dense MANETs). The provisioning of entertainment services, e.g., the distribution of news, movie trailers, songs, and game components, in dense MANETs is a challenging task, hard to achieve in a scalable way with traditional static network infrastructures. We propose lightweight autonomic dissemination of entertainment services that exploits impromptu collaborations among mobile wireless peers to replicate resources in an efficient and lazily consistent way. In particular, we have de-veloped the REDMAN middleware to manage, retrieve, and disseminate replicas of data/service components transparently from the point of view of ser-vice developers, thus facilitating the realization of wide-scale entertainment services. REDMAN implements novel lightweight solutions to identify dense MANETs, to maintain the desired resource replication degree, and to efficiently perform resource retrieval, by exploiting the assumptions of relatively high and almost constant node density to achieve scalability and limited network overhead.