A Lightweight Model for Mobile Peer-to-Peer File Sharing Systems

Abstract

Peer-to-peer file sharing applications such as BitTorrent, Gnutella, and eDonkey are becoming widely utilized using desktops and handheld mobile devices. In this paper, we propose a lightweight model for peer-to-peer file sharing systems using mobile devices. The proposed model splits the peer-to-peer mobile client into two main modules: a mobile module that runs on the mobile device and a gateway module that runs separately on a dedicated server. In order to reduce computational requirements and energy consumption, the gateway server handles the connections to distributed peers over the Internet and downloads the required chunks of a requested file. The mobile device then simply connects to the gateway server to check the status of the download process and to get the requested file as soon as the download is complete. Therefore, the gateway relieves the mobile device from searching and downloading the file chunks. We present the general design and prototype implementation of the proposed model.