Rich content sharing in mobile systems using multiple wireless networks

Abstract

There has been an increasing popularity of applications deployed on mobile devices, such as smartphones or tablets. Many of them, e.g., YouTube [1], Pandora [2], Facebook [3] and etc, require access to the Internet for content sharing while running, and contribute a huge amount of data traffic sent through cellular networks [9], which causes cellular networks currently to be overloaded. Moreover, it is predicted that mobile data traffic will increase very fast in the next few years [9]. As a result, many cellular network providers are putting a lot of effort to seeking solutions for improving their network capacity, e.g., upgrade their infrastructure, as well as decide to move away from unlimited data plans to less flexible charging models [4]. In this paper, we address the problem of efficient rich content sharing from/to mobile devices by proposing practical approaches that provide high delivery performance, reduce cellular data traffic, and release the pressure of cellular networks' heavy load on mobile users and cellular network services providers. Our approaches [13][14][15][16] all share a common technique: using complementary networks, such as WiFi, WiFi ad hoc or Bluetooth, equipped in most modern mobile devices to offload data traffic previously planned to be transmitted over cellular networks. For each proposed approach, we prove its feasibility by testing it on an Android based testbed and evaluate its performance and scalability using simulations.