A mobile bazaar for wide-area wireless services

We introduce MoB, an infrastructure for collaborative wide-area wireless data services. MoB proposes to change the current model of data services in the following fundamental ways: (1) it decouples infrastructure providers from services providers and enables fine-grained competition, (2) it allows service interactions on arbitrary timescales, and, (3) it promotes flexible composition of these fine-grained service interactions based on user and application needs. At the heart of MoB is an open market architecture in which mobile users can opportunistically trade various services with each other in a flexible manner. In this paper we first describe the overall architecture of MoB including various enablers like user reputation management, incentive management, and accounting services. We next present our experience from both simulations as well as our prototype implementation of MoB in enhancing application performance in multiple different scenarios—file transfers, web browsing, media streaming, and location-enhanced services. This work is supported in part by NSF grants CNS-0520152, CNS-0639434, CNS-0627589 and CNS-0627102. Rajiv Chakravorty received the B.E. degree from Nagpur University, Nagpur, India, in 1997 and the M.Tech. degree form the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1999. He is working towards the Ph.D. degree at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, U.K. In 2005 he was a visiting research scholar in the Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has worked with Philips Research, ASA Laboratories, Eindhoven, The Netherlands. He also pursued research at ComNets, RWTH-Aachen, Germany. His current interests include mobile and wireless systems, and networking. He is a recipient of DAAD Scholarship Award from Germany, and the Sun Microsystems Scholarship and the Hughes Hall Commonwealth scholarhip from Cambridge Univeristy. Sulabh Agarwal received the B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 2000, and the M.S. degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park in 2002. His research interest is in the area of computer networking. Suman Banerjee received the B.Tech. degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1996, and the M.S. and the Ph.D. degrees in Computer Science from University of Maryland, College Park in 1999 and 2003 respectively. He is an Assistant Professor of Computer Sciences at University of Wisconsin-Madison and heads the Wisconsin Wireless and NetworkinG Systems (WiNGS) laboratory. His broad research interests are in the areas of networking and distributed systems with a special focus in the area of wireless and mobile networking systems. Ian Pratt received the Ph.D. in Computer Science from University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K. He was elected a Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, U.K., in 1996. He is a Senior Faculty member at the Computer Loboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, U.K. He is a a leader of the Systems Research Group, where he has been architect of a number of influential projects, including the Desk Area Network workstation, the Cambridge Open Mobile System, the Xen Virtual Machine Monitor, and the XenoServer infrastructure for global computing. His research interests cover a broad range if systems topics, including computer architecture, operating system design, mobile systems, and networking.