Performance of content replication in MobiTribe: A distributed architecture for mobile UGC sharing

An increasing portion of traffic in mobile networks conies from users creating content and uploading it to the Internet to share it. The capacity of mobile networks is a limited resource and uploading high resolution content consumes a large part of it. We introduce MobiTribe, a distributed storage cloud consisting of mobile devices for storing the content created on the phones. It can serve requests for content and take advantage of networks with spare capacity to deliver the content at a lower cost. We propose a content distribution and replication algorithm which achieves this goal. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using empirical data traces of WLAN availability patterns of mobile devices, showing that it is possible to achieve 99.98% availability of a content via WLAN while minimising content distribution to an average of 2.69 replicas.