Harnessing Mobile Ad Hoc Communication for Decentralized Location-Based Services
Key: GSG+12-1
Author: Christian Groß, Dominik Stingl, Christian Gottron, Björn Richerzhagen, Christoph Münker, David Hausheer
Date: November 2012
Kind: @techreport
Keywords: wireless ad hoc network; mobile peer-to-peer; location-based services; energy-aware
Abstract: Location-based services enable (mobile) users to publish and retrieve information on particular places via smartphones. Although publishing and consuming users are often geographically ’close’ to each other, existing applications are agnostic to this fact. Instead of exchanging content in an ad hoc manner, traffic is routed over the cellular network via a central server thereby introducing an additional level of indirection into the process. To overcome this issue, we describe a novel application scenario for location-based services using WiFi ad hoc communication. To this end, we propose a fully decentralized system where nearby users can directly exchange location-based information in a peer-to-peer manner. Although our solution incurs additional communication costs, we show that, compared to a pure 3G-based approach, (i) mobile users can achieve a significantly higher download throughput, while (ii) the energy consumption of their devices is reduced. Finally, due to traffic localization, (iii) mobile network providers clearly benefit from reduced cellular traffic on their base stations.
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