SmartParcel: A Collaborative Data Sharing Framework for Mobile Operating Systems

Internet based applications for Mobile Devices such as Smartphones, Tablets, PDAs, portable media players etc. work on simple one-to-one client-server data distribution model. Concomitant with growing popularity of such devices and applications, however, are increasing concerns about volume of global online digital content generated by these devices. Network traffic originating from these devices has marked a multi-fold increase over past few years and hence, the incumbent content availability and maintainability cost. In this paper we present a novel approach for mobile data offloading, "SmartParcel", by encouraging collaborative data sharing among spatio-temporally co-existing mobile devices, thus, minimizing the overall network usage and traffic. Smart- Parcel ensures high service availability to the users in events of unavailability of access points, unavailable or limited cellular data connections, unavailability of 3G or LTE hardware etc. We develop the technology for Android but the architecture can be extended to other available mobile software platforms. Our trace based simulation results advocate high data availability to user even with its limited participation and fewer data requests to the servers.