Hybrid Peer-to-Peer Content Sharing in Mobile Networks

As the capabilities of mobile phones are increasing and they are able to consume different type of multimedia contents, it is important to provide an efficient content sharing solution for them. Since people usually store their content on their personal computer, we need architecture for content sharing which supports mobiles and personal computers as well. In this paper we propose an innovative content sharing solution, called Swarm, which offers the following benefits to service providers: cost efficient, mobility support, necessary control points to prevent misuse of the service and backend for the stored information. Swarm is a hybrid solution, it combines the advantages of peer-to-peer and client-server systems and it also considers the special abilities of mobile phones by enabling local cooperation. During the paper we introduce the proposed architecture with the main features, discuss our experience with the reference implementation, demonstrate calculations about the cost efficiency of Swarm and propose future plans for further improvements.