MobiShare : cloud-enabled opportunistic content sharing among mobile peers

Abstract

In developing countries, smartphones and high bandwidth connections are not yet within the reach of majority of the people. To share multimedia content among themselves, people rely on manual local sharing mechanisms i.e. either using physical exchange of memory card or through short-range wireless technologies, such as Bluetooth. However, this model of content sharing is not scalable in terms of number of users and shared items. In this paper, we propose MobiShare which is a mobilecloud based system designed to support searching and sharing of content among pair of mobile peers. The cloud does aggregation of shared content in user’s social network and enables scalable content search with real-time computation of expected encounter time between content source and requester. For finding expected encounter time, we build algorithms for (1) Finding mobility profiles of the users using heterogeneous location data services such as Cell ID and WiFi; and (2) Predicting places that will be visited in the future, together with corresponding time spent, using those profiles. We deployed MobiShare with 16 volunteers and collected data for 4 weeks. We present evaluation results of the system based on the collected data.