Content Dissemination on Location-based Communities: a Comparative Analysis

This paper focuses on content dissemination in location-centered communities and provides the first comparative analysis of two forwarding algorithms on real scenario, namely, ProfileCast – which has been on purposely designed for this environment – and InterestCast – which by contrast addresses more general settings. The paper provides quantitative evaluation of relevant metrics (i.e. community coverage, delivery delay, energy/message efficiency) to be considered whenever attempting to spread contents to the persons that are used to visit the same location. Moreover, the experiment allows to give an insight on the problems arising when deploying these protocols on real settings and an empirical evaluation of two different approaches. ProfileCast leverages mechanisms to automatically extract the intrinsic characteristics of the users from their behavior pattern; a content generated by a node is implicitly addressed to users with similar behavior as the source. InterestCast matches content tags against interests explicitly expressed by the users.