Large Scale Message Dissemination in Mobile Opportunistic Networks

Large scale message dissemination is important in our daily life. Typical examples include emergency notifications and advertisements. However, traditional approaches for large scale message dissemination, e.g., the Internet and cellular networks often incur high communication and maintenance costs. With the proliferation of mobile handsets and their powerful communication technologies, e.g., Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, large scale message dissemination becomes feasible and affordable. We can envision such a mechanism originating at a source, e.g., a base station, and propagating via interactions among human forwarders’ mobile handsets. This creates much opportunity for large scale message dissemination; however, it also introduces new challenges. The message source might deliver irrelevant messages to receivers, irritating them and wasting time. Therefore, the first key challenge is to ensure the efficiency of message delivery in such mobile opportunistic networks. Generally, large scale message dissemination needs to involve many participants. Some might not forward the message unless appropriate incentives are provided. Hence, the second key challenge is proving such incentives for message forwarding. In this dissertation, we will study the two challenges. Our aim is to provide efficient message delivery and message forwarding incentives in large scale message dissemination in these networks. We first study efficient message delivery in large scale message dissemination. To efficiently deliver messages in mobile opportunistic networks, the source can send