NeTS: Medium: Collaborative Research: Mobile Content Sharing Networks: Theory to Implementation

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The last few years have witnessed an explosive growth in the popularity and capabilities of mobile handheld devices such as smart-phones, tablets, and laptops. The rapidly expanding computational power of these portable devices has enabled their users to access, process, and share content anytime, anywhere. However, these devices have already put significant stress on many of today's 3G/4G cellular networks, which, if left unaddressed, will result in increasingly poor quality-of-service and user experience in the future. To address this problem, the project investigates how to exploit the key attributes of mobile content sharing environments to dramatically increase network performance. Preliminary studies show that jointly utilizing the wireless channel and mobility can yield greater gains than even the sum of exploiting mobility and the channel independently. In this case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts! Thus, the main focus of this research is to (i) develop the analytical foundation for double opportunism - i.e., joint exploitation of the wireless channel and mobility-considering the practical realities of the wireless environment for content distribution networks; (ii) develop low-complexity algorithms, heuristics, and distributed protocols that are provably efficient; (iii) investigate the impact of imperfect knowledge on performance; (iv) validate the results via testbed deployment.The project is expected to lead to fundamental breakthroughs in the design and performance of wireless networks for content sharing. The algorithms and protocols developed by exploiting double opportunism, and the theories underlying them, will have a significant impact on the wireless industry.