Collaborative storage with mobile devices in wireless networks for P2P media sharing

Abstract

Information storage and storage sharing are key components of modern networked computer systems. Mobile devices such as PDAs and cell phones normally have very limited storage capacities compared with PCs or laptops, while storing a large number of media objects (such as e-books, pictures and videos, etc.) on mobile devices could take a lot of space. In this paper, we study collaborative storage with mobile devices, where contributory storage infrastructure is constructed among a group of mobile devices for P2P (peer-to-peer) media sharing. We analyze the design tradeoffs of the collaborative storage system with mobile devices via concrete application examples in different settings. In this study, we focus on two main performance metrics: (1) the availability rate for a stored data object in the collaborative storage system when a peer node tries to access the given item, and (2) the uploading and retrieval delay for a stored data object of different sizes in a variety of circumstances. We experimentally verify the performance and feasibility of the constructed prototype of a shared e-library with a collection of e-books, pictures and videos based upon the paradigm of collaborative storage with mobile devices.