CD-PAN: A Protocol for Peer-to-Peer Content Distribution in a Weakly Connected and Heterogeneous Personal Area Network

This paper presents CD-PAN, a mechanism to automatically distribute content objects to weakly connected heterogeneous content devices in a personal area network without a global namespace. The content devices under consideration range from cell phones to personal computers, each of which is capable of downloading content objects on its own. The proposed mechanism alleviates the need to manually synchronize content that is downloaded to each of these content devices. A simulation study shows that CD-PAN outperforms other prefetching schemes in all our workload experiments. The performance improvement tended to increase with increase in popularity distribution skew, temporal locality and frequency of content creation/updates. The performance of CD-PAN increases when pair-wise communication capabilities are higher, and also adapts well to increasing power and metadata constraints.