Content and Service Replication Strategies in Multi-hop Wireless Mesh Networks.

by Shudong Jin, Limin Wang. MSWiM'05, Oct. 10-13, Montreal, Quebec. Paper here.

The paper studies the impact of the replication of content in a wireless mesh networks. They show that in a 2-d mesh network, the optimal number of replicas of an object is $p^(2/3)$, where $p$ is the access probability of the object.

The result is pretty, as it is a bit counter-intuitive (a replication rate proportional to the access probability is what would seem natural), and the derivation is actually rather simple and straightforward.

The paper also opens research questions into: how to account for the wireless physical layer. In the paper, it is abstracted as a way to define the connectivity, and thus the topology, of the network, but the actual impact of the wireless interface on the placement of the replicated content could have some other implications. An interesting idea to look into.