Modeling elements and solving techniques for the data dissemination problem

Systems of Systems (SoS) are collections of non-homogeneous, independent systems that interact to provide services. These systems can opportunistically share data during contacts that arise whenever two entities are close enough to each other. It is assumed in this paper that all contacts can be reliably predicted, i.e. the mobility of every system can be reliably estimated. A datum is split into several identified datum units to be delivered to a subset of recipient systems. During a contact, a given emitting system can transmit to a given receiving system one of the datum units that it possesses. The dissemination problem consists in finding a transfer plan which enables all the datum units to be transmitted from the sources (the systems that possess datum units from the beginning) to all the recipient systems. In this paper, we propose dominance-rule-based techniques for solving the data dissemination problem. In particular, we describe preprocessing procedures and some integer-linear-programming formulations to solve the problem.