User-profile-driven collaborative bandwidth sharing on mobile phones

The advent of smart phones, along with the paradigm shift towards cloud-based services, presents new challenges to the cellular backbone infrastructure. Cisco predicts that mobile data traffic will double every year through 2014, with a CAGR of 108% from 2009 to 2014, reaching 3.6 exabytes per month. We propose to exploit the potential of smart phones in proximity cooperatively, using their resources to reduce the demand on the cellular infrastructure, through a decision framework called RACE (Resource Aware Collaborative Execution). RACE enables the use of other mobile devices in the promixity as mobile data relays. RACE is a Markov Decision Process (MDP) optimization framework that takes user profiles and user preferences to determine the degree of collaboration. Both centralized and decentralized policies are developed and validated through simulation using real mobile usage traces. We implemented a simple prototype on a network of HTC G1 phones running the Android 1.5 operating system to demonstrate the viability of the system.