Purpose: Content delivery in dynamic networks is a challenging task, because paths
may change during delivery and content might get lost. Replication is a typical
measure to increase robustness and performance.
Method: In previous work we proposed a hormone-based algorithm that delivers
content, and optimizes the distribution of replicas. Clients express demands by
creating hormones that will be released to the network. The corresponding resources
are attracted by this hormone and travel towards a higher hormone concentration. This
leads to a placement of content close to their most frequent requesters. In addition to
that the hormone-based delivery requires an appropriate replication and clean-up
strategy to balance the replicas throughout the network without exceeding the nodes’
storage limits or the networks communication capacity.