Epidemic Spreading of Messages

Abstract:   Rapidly growing popularity of mobile devices such as smartphones and digital tablets has changed the way people obtain information. Cellular and wireless local area networks provide almost ubiquitous connectivity. However, many scenarios threaten to leave us disconnected for extended periods of time. We study how peer-to-peer communication with mobile devices can be used without network infrastructure. With epidemic models for opportunistic content spreading we investigate the performance of such systems and compare them to simulated results. Real life mobility traces are used as a base to simulate how information is spread between the devices and two different types of spreading were studied in more detail. In particular, we investigate how fast a percentage of the total number of devices can receive the information. The results are displayed for the best performing device and indicate that these models does not necessarily have to agree with what actually happens. Nevertheless, we argue that the models provide a good mathematical framework for analyzing systems of this sort and conclude that these models can be extended to incorporate more general assumptions.