Krowd: A Key-Value Store for Crowded Venues

Abstract

Attendees of live events want to capture and share rich content using their mobile devices, during the events. However, the infrastructure at venues that host live events provide poor, low-bandwidth connectivity. Instead of relying on infrastructure provided by the venue, we propose to stand up a temporary "infrastructure" using the very devices that need it, to enable content-sharing with nearby devices. To this end, we developed Krowd, a novel system that provides a key-value store abstraction to applications that share content among local, nearby users. We evaluated Krowd using over 200 hours of real-world traces from sold-out NBA and NHL playoffs and show that it is 50% faster and consumes 50% less bandwidth than alternative systems. We believe that Krowd is the only decentralized and distributed system to provide a key-value store made for neighboring mobile devices and of neighboring mobile devices.