Loco: Local cooperative data offloading system based on location information

The development of high speed mobile networks and the widespread use of smartphones have enabled users to easily obtain large data volumes via the Internet. This causes a heavy consumption of network resources, a burden on the available bandwidth. To solve such problems, a data offloading method with a wireless LAN access point has been used to distribute traffic from mobile to fixed networks. However, the method using wireless LAN access points can only change the communication paths but cannot reduce the overall traffic. This paper proposes a local cooperative data offloading system (LoCO) that reduces the overall traffic by sharing data, with direct communication between neighbors based on their location-related information. Moreover, the authors implemented the LoCO system on Android smartphones and clarified its performance in comparison with a traditional client/server system through experiments to download data in a real-world environment.