Vedran Podobnik, Iva Bojic, Luka Vrdoljak, Mario Kusek This paper proposes a distributed model of service provisioning process for mobile network users who share a common interest in a service content offered in the network. The model is based on an idea that such users could individually acquire disjunctive parts of service content from a remote server (via a wide area mobile network), and then subsequently exchange them among themselves in an ad hoc local network in a peer-to-peer fashion, thus allowing each user to reassemble the entire content for her/his own use. The benefits of this approach include lowering the load on the “expensive” link to the telco’s network and saving the energy for wide-area communication on users’ mobile devices. The key questions to solve include recognizing the “common interest” of users and achieving their collaboration as described above. As an example, we show a service in which mobile users form an implicit social network and collaborate while downloading a selected multimedia content from the server under the control of the telco. A proof-of-concept implementation, named Collaborative Downloading (CollDown for short), is evaluated by using real mobile phones in a real network.
Achieving collaborative service provisioning for mobile network users: the CollDown example