Supporting mobile devices in Gnutella file sharing network with mobile agents

Abstract

The use of peer to peer file sharing networks such as Gnutella is proliferating on the Internet, but its use is bandwidth consuming due to the broadcast nature of some peer to peer protocols. This is undesirable for mobile devices due to their bandwidth and power constraints. This paper proposes an architecture that uses mobile agents to participate in the Gnutella network on behalf of mobile devices in order to reduce the amount of traffic for the mobile device, as well as providing support for device mobility. Using real Gnutella traffic characteristics, analysis on the viability of the architecture is presented.