MobiTribe: Cost Efficient Distributed User Generated Content Sharing on Smartphones

Distributed social networking services show promise to solve data ownership and privacy problems associated with centralized approaches. Smartphones could be used for hosting and sharing users data in a distributed manner, if the associated high communication costs and battery usage issues of the distributed systems could be mitigated. We propose a novel mechanism for reducing these costs to a level comparable with centralized systems by using a connectivity aware replication strategy. We develop an algorithm for grouping devices into tribes for content replication among intended content consumers and serve it using low-cost network connections. We evaluate the performance of the algorithm using three real world trace data sets. The results show that a persistent low-cost network availability can be achieved with an average of two replicas per content. Additionally, cellular bandwidth consumption and energy consumption of users are evaluated analytically using user content creation and consumption modeling. The results show that the proposed mechanism lowers monetary and energy costs for users compared to non-mobile-optimized distributed systems irrespective of the content demand model.