Towards cooperative content downloading for resource-constrained mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices often operate in resource constrained environments with intermittent connectivity, bandwidth, battery power, etc. On these devices, existing cooperative content sharing protocols and models (e.g. Peer to Peer and client-server) present major drawbacks. Presently, a user has to maintain the connection between the peers when downloading content. For instance, when a large multimedia file is to be downloaded and the user has limited resources the corresponding content acquisition is constrained. This can easily lead to poor user experience. In this paper, we present the design of a resource-aware cooperative content downloading system for low-cost mobile devices. We propose a novel combination of computed resource level, reliability index, and segment determination to cooperatively download, aggregate and distribute downloaded chunks. The ability to improve resource utilization for low-end devices while cooperatively scheduling to download content is also discussed. Finally, we end this paper by reporting experimental results illustrating the merits of the system.