Friend relay: a resource sharing framework for mobile wireless devices

The rising popularity of wireless devices opens exciting possibilities for users to share their resources. However, there exists no end-to-end, general-purpose, resource sharing framework for such devices. Existing resource sharing solutions address only part of the overall challenge and barely consider mobile wireless devices' critical characteristics, such as mobility, CPU capability, and power limitations. Furthermore, they do not have mechanisms to control the degree to which resources are shared. This lack of control likely leads to over-usage of shared resources, therefore, reducing computing capacity and draining the batteries of devices that are sharing resources. In this paper, we present Friend Relay, a resource-sharing framework for mobile wireless devices that offers automatic publishing, discovery and configuration, as well as monitoring and control. Our contribution is to add monitoring and control as mechanisms to manage the utilization of shared resources. To evaluate Friend Relay, we quantify the benefits of monitoring and controlling resource usage for Internet access sharing. For our evaluation, we developed a prototype of Friend Relay. In addition, we prototyped "Internet Sharing", a service to allow users to share the ISP subscription of another user. Our evaluation focuses on the performance of this service with and without the Friend Relay monitoring and control mechanisms. Our results show that mobile devices that either share or use resources can benefit significantly from using our Friend Relay architecture.