A mobile bazaar for wide-area wireless services

We introduce MoB, an infrastructure for collab6 orative wide-area wireless data services. MoB proposes to 7 change the current model of data services in the following 8 fundamental ways: (1) it decouples infrastructure providers 9 from services providers and enables fine-grained competi10 tion, (2) it allows service interactions on arbitrary timescales, 11 and, (3) it promotes flexible composition of these fine-grained 12 service interactions based on user and application needs. 13 At the heart of MoB is an open market architecture 14 in which mobile users can opportunistically trade various 15 services with each other in a flexible manner. In this pa16 per we first describe the overall architecture of MoB in17 cluding various enablers like user reputation management, 18 incentive management, and accounting services. We next 19 present our experience from both simulations as well as 20 our prototype implementation of MoB in enhancing applica21 tion performance in multiple different scenarios—file trans22 fers, web browsing, media streaming, and location-enhanced 23 services. 24 This work is supported in part by NSF grant CNS-0520152. R. Chakravorty ( ) . S. Agarwal . S. Banerjee Department of Computer Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706, USA e-mail: [email protected] S. Agarwal e-mail: [email protected] S. Banerjee e-mail: [email protected] I. Pratt Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB3 0FD, UK e-mail: [email protected]