A simple approximate analysis of floating content for context-aware applications

Context-awareness is a peculiar characteristic of an expanding set of applications that make use of a combination of restricted spatio-temporal locality and mobile communications, to deliver a variety of services. Opportunistic communications satisfy well the communication requirements of these applications, because they naturally incorporate context. Recently, an opportunistic communication paradigm called "Floating Content" (FC) was proposed, to support infrastructure-less, distributed content sharing. But how good is floating content in supporting context-aware applications? In this work, we present a simple approximate analytical model for the performance analysis of context-aware applications that use floating content. We estimate the "success probability" for a representative category of context-aware applications, and show how the system can be configured to achieve the application's target QoS. We validate our model using extensive simulations under different settings and mobility patterns, showing that our model-based predictions are highly accurate under a wide range of conditions.