Cooperative Web Browsing for Mobile Phones

This paper advocates a novel approach for web browsing on mobile phones based on cooperation among mobile phones within close proximity. In the actual state of the art, mobile phones can access the Web using different cellular technologies such as GPRS, EDGE, UMTS and others. Following the state of the art, higher data rates can only be achieved by increasing complexity, price and energy consumption of the phones. Therefore we propose a novel disruptive architecture where mobile phones are grouped together in clusters using a short range communication such as Bluetooth, sharing their cellular links. In case a mobile phone within the cluster requests a web page, the cellular links of all the devices in the cluster are used to download pieces of the page. When the individual download of partial information is completed, the data is sent to the requesting phone via Bluetooth where the web page is built up and shown to the user. Throughout the paper it will be shown that better performance is achieved in terms of an increased data rate and user experience doing web browsing on mobile phones can be highly improved.