A constraint-programming-based approach for solving the data dissemination problem

Systems of mobile Systems are intermittently connected networks that use store-carry-forward routing for data transfers. Independent systems collaborate and exchange data to achieve a common goal. Data transfers are only possible between systems that are close enough to each other, when a so-called contact occurs. During a contact, a sending system can transmit to a receiving system a fixed amount of data held in its interna then assume it holds at a til buffer. We assume that the trajectories of component systems are predictable, and consequently that a sequence of contacts may be considered. This dissemination problem is aimed at finding a transfer plan such that a set of data can be transferred from a given subset of source systems to all the recipient systems. In this paper, we propose an original constraint-programming-based algorithm for solving this problem. Computational results show that this approach is an improvement on the integer-linear-programming-based approach that we proposed in a previous paper.