Mobile Network Adaptation in the Ubidata Mobile File System

Abstract

An important characteristic of mobile networks is the large variations of available bandwidth. Network conditions can vary from strong to weak to total disconnection. These variations may be masked from the users by a common technique called “data hoarding”. Limited mobile network bandwidth is an expensive resource today and in the foreseeable future. Efficiently utilizing scarce mobile bandwidth is a challenge for managing data in the mobile environment. In this paper, we introduced the network adaptation approaches used in the UbiData mobile file system. UbiData mobile file system is designed to automatically select a mobile user's active data set and automatically migrate that data when the user switches from device to device. Automation of data management, including data set selection, data replication, network adaptation, and data reintegration, is a goal in our system to tackle the problems incurred from data unavailability in weak and disconnection modes. We discuss the adaptation techniques in our UbiData system and present enhancements. To further reduce the network bandwidth requirement, two major approaches are introduced in our system. First, the communication requests are shortly delayed and optimized. Secondly, we employ content aware/transparent adaptation to reduce possible data transmission within acceptable weak connection bandwidth. The mobile network adaptation techniques can significantly reduce the potential communications between the mobile devices and the fixed host.