Analyzing the Concept of Involving Low End Devices in a Cooperative Network

The development of hardware and software of low end mobile phones and even simple media players will increasingly allow different type of content to be consumed on them creating pressure for efficient ways to also access the content. Since efficient, scalable distribution of multimedia content is a key strength of peer-to-peer technologies, bringing that technology to the player devices seems attractive. This way low end devices would be able to join and cooperate in an existing peer-to-peer network. The paper introduces a complete J2ME based BitTorrent solution for mainstream phones, called MobTorrent which supports both downloading and uploading. We analyze the key elements of MobTorrent and introduce issues related to the limited capabilities of low end devices. The performance of the complete application is evaluated by speed measurements. In general handheld devices have small batteries, thus the energy consumption is a key property of applications on low end devices. The paper also discusses the possibility of implementing Bluetooth based local cooperation in MobTorrent and the key factors of how to bring peer-to-peer technology to simple media player devices.