Peer-to-peer Cooperative Networking for Cellular Mobile Devices

Cellular mobile devices, and in particular smartphones, have become ubiquitous. While bandwidth has steadily increased from 2G devices with Edge to 3G and now 3G LTE (4G), so has the demand for bandwidth intensive applications and streaming of multimedia content. Supporting high densities of such users in urban environments has become a challenge. In this paper, we describe an approach to peer-to-peer cooperative networking that exploits the WiFi interface in peer-to-peer mode in order to reduce the demand on the cellular network while at the same time increasing the reliability of data delivery. We describe multiple scenarios that benefit from such middleware and present some experimental results.