Keyword-based mobile application sharing

The advent and wide adoption of smartphones in the second half of '00s has completely changed our everyday mobile computing experience. Tens of applications are being introduced every day in the application markets. Given the technology progress and the fact that mobile devices are becoming strong computing devices, mobile applications are expected to follow suit and become computation-heavy, bandwidth-hungry and latency-sensitive. In this paper, we introduce a new mobile computing paradigm to alleviate some of the network stress that mobile applications are already putting into the network, e.g., in case of crowded areas and events, where the mobile network effectively collapses. According to this paradigm, users can share the applications that they have on their mobile devices with nearby users that want access to processed information, which their own applications cannot provide. In a sense, then, the client application instance is also acting as a server instance in order to serve requests from nearby users. A representative example is a route-finder application in a busy station, airport, stadium or festival, or a gaming application onboard a flight. Our paradigm builds on Information-Centric Networking (ICN) and uses keyword-based requests to discover shared applications in the vicinity.