Providing service assurance in mobile opportunistic networks

Concomitant to the growing popularity of Internet enabled mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, PDAs, portable media players etc., however, are the concerns about availability of Internet access points for these devices. Network traffic originating from these devices has marked a multi-fold increase over the past few years. This increase in network traffic has in turn resulted in increased content availability and maintainability cost to the cellular service providers. Major challenges faced by mobile Internet users are limited hardware resources (3G or LTE) or exhaustion of carrier enforced data plans. Thus, users often either overpay for service availability such as (3G or LTE) or suffer incapability of accessing Internet services. In this paper, we argue that the ad-hoc network comprising of spatio-temporally co-existing users, identified as “Familiar Strangers” could be harnessed for viral dissemination of mobile application data. We present the architecture of a collaborative data sharing framework which comprises of two services, namely SmartParcel and CollabAssure. “SmartParcel” allows users to share mobile application data with their spatio-temporally co-existing peers. This service allows a user to receive application specific data from its neighboring nodes instead of cloud infrastructure. This reduces the network overhead generated by a large number of devices and thus, reducing content maintainability and dissemination costs at the server side. This system, however, suffers from the “tragedy of commons” problem, to overcome which we present the design of CollabAssure”. “CollabAssure” is an auction based, ad-hoc market model, assuring service by giving users incentives to “sublet” their surplus data plans to the users without Internet access. CollabAssure service allows users to participate in ad hoc auctions with their spatio-temporally co-existing neighbors as buyers or sellers of the data bandwidth. This in turn reduces under utilization overhead of the overpaying mobile data users. Users with limited or no data plans also benefit from CollabAssure service by receiving services from ad-hoc peers. We perform trace based simulations by varying data refresh rates, allowed server connections, probability of user participation and analyze the data availability at different times of the day. Our simulation results advocate a higher Internet data service is ensured by using our proposed data sharing framework.