Using Cooperation for Low Power Low Latency Cellular Connectivity

Mobile devices today rely on cellular (3G or LTE) connectivity be-cause it has ubiquitous coverage. Unfortunately cellular links are energy hungry at low bit-rates and have high round-trip times after idle periods. These characteristics punish common mobile applica-tions such as web browsing and streaming, decreasing battery life and user satisfaction. We present the design and implementation of the Mobile kib-butz, a system that improves the performance of cellular links by having nearby users share their links with each other via shorter range wireless links- WiFi or Bluetooth. Without requiring appli-cation specific knowledge, instrumentation, or recompilation, the kibbutz allows multiple users ’ traffic to be consolidated on a sub-set of links, leading to reduced energy consumption and smaller round-trip times, while ensuring fairness across different users. We have implemented the kibbutz on Samsung Galaxy Nexus de-vices and shown that for typical usage applications, collaborating phones consume 25 % less energy when listening to radio, experi-ence more responsive web browsing (1.2s faster on average), and 33 % faster downloads