A mobile bazaar for wide-area wireless services

We introduce MoB, an infrastructure for collaborative wide-area wireless data services. MoB proposes to change the current model of data services in the following fundamental ways: (1) it decouples infrastructure providers from services providers and enables fine-grained competition, (2) it allows service interactions on arbitrary timescales, and, (3) it promotes flexible composition of these fine-grained service interactions based on user and application needs. At the heart of MoB is an open market architecture in which mobile users can opportunistically trade various services with each other in a flexible manner. In this paper we first describe the overall architecture of MoB including various enablers like user reputation management, incentive management, and accounting services. We next present our experience from both simulations as well as our prototype implementation of MoB in enhancing application performance in multiple different scenarios—file transfers, web browsing, media streaming, and location-enhanced services.