Cooperative mobile internet access with opportunistic scheduling

Ubiquitous and resilient Internet connection access is becoming a necessity of life. Moreover, the amount of data requested by mobile users is increasing rapidly. Cooperative mobile Internet access is a promising approach to addressing these demands, by giving the mobile devices the opportunity to use the help of other devices to access the Internet. The helpers can download the data requested by the other users, referred to as clients, through their cellular connections, and can transmit the downloaded data to the clients using WiFi. In this paper, we consider the problem of sharing the resources of helpers among a set of clients that request the assistance of the helpers. Opportunistic scheduling is an effective method that uses the dynamic channel conditions to elevate the systems´ overall utilities. We propose an opportunistic scheduling algorithm to use the helpers efficiently and share them among the clients in a fair way. Through simulation results, we show the effectiveness of our cooperative downloading methods.