Patent ID: 7720060

Claim:
An information dissemination system, comprising: at least one node acting as a data source configured to execute an application wanting to propagate information; at least one node acting as a data recipient; and an information layer residing on all of the nodes in a system, the information layer to: receive a generic utility function from the application wanting to propagate information on the node acting as a data source, wherein the utility function specifies information dissemination needs of the application and accompanies the information generated by the application; applying the generic utility function at the node acting as a data source to calculate a microutility for each data sample of the information, wherein the microutility is based upon predicted usefulness of the information, relevance and distance metrics, and contextual information of the network; transmit the data samples and associated microutilities from the data source; and evaluate the microutility on non-data source nodes of the system based upon a position of the non-data source nodes relative to the data source to propagate the data samples through the system to any recipients, the propagation based upon the microutility.