Using tuple-spaces to manage the storage and dissemination of spatial–temporal content

Structured, spatial–temporal content arises in application areas such as mobile computing, intelligent transportation, urban mobility, and ubiquitous sensing. For the distributed storage and dissemination of such content, peer-to-peer solutions appear to be the natural choice. However, a closer analysis shows that distributed hash tables (DHT) alone are not enough: firstly, they do not maintain the original data structure needed to efficiently access the comprising attributes, and secondly, they lead to high signaling traffic when the data is short lived, such as in high mobility scenarios. In order to address these two problems we propose a novel content dissemination architecture based on an overlay of space-based containers. Furthermore, we apply the proposed concept to realize a concrete application in the field of intelligent transportation, and present the results of the performance evaluation conducted with the system prototype.