Typhoon: a middleware for epidemic propagation of software updates

Applications for mobiles devices are subject to very frequent updates for fixing security vulnerabilities, ensuring compatibility with new hardware and APIs or enhancing functionalities. Getting the new version of an application involves the download of a significant amount of data, which is not practical through low-bandwidth/high-cost links. As a consequence, mobile device users often fail to update their applications. This paper introduces a collaborative and epidemic updating scheme to improve software updates distribution. In our approach, updates are distributed by the surrounding devices, eliminating the need for costly resources. Moreover, the packaging of these updates, which consists in delivering binary patches of the difference with a previous version, dramatically reduces the amount of data to download. Preliminary experimental results based on real contact traces show that our approach offers an efficient selection and recovery of patches, ensuring a fast update for each participating device.