ubiCDN: a ubiquitous, user-based, mobile video distribution platform

An average smartphone or tablet has at least 10GBs of memory available. Very roughly, this corresponds to 2,000 mins of High Definition (HD) video, that is almost 1.5days worth of video content readily available (with memory chip sizes shrinking and prices falling sharply). For news applications, or short video clips, this means that the average mobile device is a small, always on, always connected and mobile data-centre. Fluentic is developing solutions to exploit the spare memory of a fraction of mobile users in order to disseminate content of popular smartphone applications (e.g., content providers such as BBC, Sky, iTV, The Guardian) to every device in the vicinity that has got the application installed. Content providers proactively push content to selected mobile users (the “sources”). Sources then disseminate content to other users that are interested in the same content (the “destinations”). Sources and destinations sync through our unique, information-centric connectivity software solutions. Sources and destinations pair when both devices have the same application installed and the source nodes have updated content to disseminate. Content distribution takes place in a Device-to-Device (D2D), Peer-to-Peer (P2P) manner, independently of the cellular connection. Therefore, challenged connectivity and data caps are not a barrier to the distribution of large volumes of data.