On the 7th International Conference on Autonomous Infrastructure, Management and Security (AIMS 2013) members of SmartenIT's TUD division presented their ideas on mobile bulk data distribution in front of a representative sample of researchers from the international network research community.

The distribution of bulk content such as video streams and system updates is becoming increasingly important on mobile devices. For this kind of data transfers, the application of the Peer-to-Peer (P2P) paradigm is attractive for content providers, as it allows to leverage clients’ (peers’) resources for the dissemination process. The contribution of resources can be encouraged by applying reciprocal incentives, which prevent a peer from consuming more resources than he contributed to the system. However, reciprocation has drawbacks, e.g., in terms of high energy consumption and low performance, when applied to mobile peers. In this work, we substantiate these problems through measurements and propose a virtual node concept as a possible solution.

Virtual nodes can serve as a primitive to project social relationships to a network graph and are therefore planned to be applied within the context of SmartenIT for the distribution of media data of high volume.