Crowdsourced Mobile Data Transfer with Delay Bound

In this article, we design a crowdsourcing system, CrowdMAC, where mobile devices form a local community or marketplace to share network access and transfer data for each other. CrowdMAC enables (i) mobile clients to select and exploit multiple mobile hotspots in its vicinity for data transfer and (ii) mobile hotspots to open their cellular connectivity to admit/serve delay-bounded requests from mobile users for a fee. The evaluations of CrowdMAC indicate that (i) mobile clients can tune preferred trade-offs between cost and delay through a control knob, (ii) mobile hotspots comply with all delay bounds, and (iii) the system ensures stable and efficient transfer.