CollabAssure: A collaborative market based data service assurance framework for mobile devices

Concomitant to the growing popularity of Internet enabled mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets, PDAs, portable media players etc., however, are the concerns about availability of Internet access points for these devices. Mobile users often either overpay for service availability such as (3G or LTE) or suffer incapability of accessing Internet services due to limited hardware resources (3G or LTE) or exhaustion of carrier enforced data plans. In this paper we introduce Collab Assure, an auction based, ad-hoc market model assuring service for users with no Internet access capability. Collab Assure framework provides service assurance through opportunistic ad-hoc networks formed by spatio-temporally co-existing mobile users. The system allows users to 'sublet' their surplus data plans to the users without Internet access. We discuss the design and implementation of Collab Assure technology in Android framework. Our simulation results advocate the success of this approach on real world traces, where mobile users need to participate in auctions for achieving on-demand and low-cost data service.