mango: low-cost, scalable delivery of rich content on mobiles

Abstract

We present mango, a low-cost and highly scalable content-delivery service for mobile phones. The service is targeted at emerging countries such as India where users are highly price sensitive, and there is considerable demand for rich media content. mango is designed as a content "synch-up" service. Users install an app on the phone, and through a simple menu select content for download, upload or sharing. Then, in order to actually transfer content to and from their phones, users visit or opportunistically connect with mango hot-spots. The hot-spots are short-range cells (installed in shops, cafes, or as an app in other users' phones) with a back-haul connection and a wireless interface such as Bluetooth to communicate with the phones. Given a large number of such low-cost, short-range access-points, the mango network delivers content to the very edge of the network, to within a few feet from the user. Such a content delivery architecture is faster, cheaper and can support a much larger number of users than macro-cellular data networks. In this paper we present the mango service architecture, discuss its potential as a substrate for deploying a range of novel applications and present technical challenges for timely, low-cost content-delivery.