Peer Support in a Mobile World

Even with the emerging technological advances, it is likely that in the near to medium term future the resources available to the mobile user will be at least a magnitude lower than that available to the wired user. The scarcity of resources such as bandwidth, battery power, and screen size pose fundamental challenges in developing effective wireless services. At the same time, the demand for such wireless services is growing rapidly. Users crave the freedom and flexibility in lifestyle that a wireless platform can provide and want similar electronic services to those available on wired platforms. Further, the next generation of electronic services will have significant multi-media content that will further stress the mobile infrastructure. The data management and networking technology solutions proposed to overcome the severe physical constraints in a mobile environment have brought us several steps towards a pervasive mobile information and communication infrastructure. However, to continue keeping up with the emerging multi-media services, this position paper advocates that technological solutions need to be coupled with socio-economic techniques. The basic proposal is to develop and facilitate peering relationships between multiple mobile units so that they can collectively combat the problems in a resource-scarce mobile environment. The well known social phenomenon summarized in the phrase “Unity is Strength” needs to be embodied in future mobile environments. To achieve this goal, technology solutions are necessary that enable peering mobile units to collaborate on different levels. Further, social and economic models need to be developed that provide the incentive for mobile units that are contending for the same set of scarce resources to cooperate with each other and work towards the collective good. In the rest of this position paper, the above ideas are further developed and the associated research topics are identified. Also, two examples are briefly described from recent research papers that employ the idea of peering in different contexts.