Cooperative Mobile Web Browsing

Abstract

This paper advocates a novel approach for mobile web browsing based on cooperation among wireless devices within close proximity operating in a cellular environment. In the actual state of the art, mobile phones can access the web using different cellular technologies. However, the supported data rates are not sufficient to cope with the ever increasing traffic requirements resulting from advanced and rich content services. Extending the state of the art, higher data rates can only be achieved by increasing complexity, cost, and energy consumption of mobile phones. In contrast to the linear extension of current technology, we propose a novel architecture where mobile phones are grouped together in clusters, using a short-range communication such as Bluetooth, sharing, and accumulating their cellular capacity. The accumulated data rate resulting from collaborative interactions over short-range links can then be used for cooperative mobile web browsing. By implementing the cooperative web browsing on commercial mobile phones, it will be shown that better performance is achieved in terms of increased data rate and therefore reduced access times, resulting in a significantly enhanced web browsing user experience on mobile phones.