Agora: Open Market Architecture for Collaborative Mobile Internet
"Agora" is the Greek term for an open marketplace.
Introduction
Agora is an open market architecture for collaborative
mobile Internet. In Agora people can be traders and/or customers - traders sell and customers buy wireless Internet
bandwidth. Motivation for Agora stems from an important fact that location
of mobile users tend to be clustered to form "people hot-spots"
for example, in shops, stations, buses and trains.
The main aim in Agora is to wirelessly exploit the unused capacity (e.g. bandwidth, service etc.) of
such user clusters.
The Agora Architecture combines several benefits:
An Open-market Architecture:- Agora is an open market architecture where in-range mobile devices provide mechanisms that allow users to harvest idle devices to be used as personal network service providers, and obtain necessary data services through them. The architecture offers a common ground for integration of heterogeneous mobile terminals, networks, services as well as applications.
Wireless Diversity:-
Agora combines different ways of
exploiting distributed wireless diversity into a single architecture.
Users in Agora aggregate bandwidths by exploiting three different levels
of wireless diversity:
Agora
exploits wireless diversity by smartly striping packets across
different wireless links. Exploiting wireless diversity comes as an
important
benefit in the next generation mobile communication systems. Recent
research has experimentally demonstrated the benefits of exploiting
such wireless diversity to enhance reliability of the wireless
communication link.
Incentive-based Collaboration:- Agora architecture allows incentive-based collaboration amoung in-range mobile devices. The service discovery and charging scheme used in Agora provides appropriate means of guiding the Agora system to its optimal operating point. Devices in Agora that offer data forwarding services, recover their costs associated with energy losses and traffic loading through credit arising from using Agora's innovative charging scheme. The charging mechanism used in Agora is fully centralized, where security is ensured.
Mobile Services:- A set of in-range mobile devices perform device/service discovery to leverage service-level benefits of this architecture. Agora supports three types of services:
Full Application Support:- Agora integrates applications
with diverse QoS requirements such as:
For highly mobile environments, high bandwidth services is possible by
striping packets across multiple wireless links simultaneously. Striping
packets across number of such links has shown to significantly improve web
download and streaming performance by at least a factor of 2 and
3 respectively.
Fig. - The Agora Architecture for Collaborative Mobile Internet
Faculty
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