Cooperative Internet Access Using Helper Nodes and Opportunistic Scheduling

Having ubiquitous access to the Internet is becoming a necessity of life. Furthermore, we are witnessing a rapid increase in the amount of data requested by mobile users. Cooperative Internet access is a promising approach for addressing these demands, which gives the mobile devices the opportunity to receive help from other mobile devices in order to access the Internet. The helpers can download the data requested by the other users, called clients, through their cellular connections. Then, they transmit the downloaded data to the clients using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth connections. In this paper, we consider the problem of how to share the resources of helpers among a set of clients that request their assistance. Opportunistic scheduling is an effective method that uses the dynamic channel conditions to elevate the systems' overall utilities. We propose an opportunistic scheduling algorithm in order to efficiently use the helper nodes and share them among the clients fairly. We propose a rate control and scheduling method in the case of using only Wi-Fi connections. We also propose a solution for the case of using Wi-Fi and Bluetooth at the same time. Through simulation results, we show the effectiveness of our cooperative downloading methods.