Using Cooperation for Low Power Low Latency Cellular Connectivity

Mobile devices today rely on cellular (3G or LTE) connectivity be-cause it has ubiquitous coverage. Unfortunately cellular links are energy hungry at low bit-rates and have high round-trip times after idle periods. These characteristics punish common mobile applica-tions such as web browsing and streaming, decreasing battery life and user satisfaction.
We present the design and implementation of the Mobilekib-butz,a system that improves the performance of cellular links by having nearby users share their links with each other via shorter
range wireless links – WiFi or Bluetooth. Without requiring appli-cation specific knowledge, instrumentation, or recompilation,the kibbutz allows multiple users’ traffic to be consolidated on a sub-set of links, leading to reduced energy consumption and smaller round-trip times, while ensuring fairness across different users.
We have implemented thekibbutzon Samsung Galaxy Nexus…

Catalin Nicutar, Dragos Niculescu and Costin Raiciu. ACM Conext 2014 Sydney, Australia