mango: Low-Cost, Scalable Delivery of Rich Content on Mobile Devices

We present mango, a novel low-cost and highly scalable content delivery service for mobile phones. The service is targeted at emerging countries such as India where users are highly price sensitive, and there is considerable demand for rich media content. mango is designed as a content "synch-up" service. Users install an application (app) on the phone, and through a simple menu select content for download, upload, or sharing. Then, in order to actually transfer content to and from their phones, users visit or opportunistically connect with mango hotspots. The hotspots are short range cells (installed in shops, cafes, or as an app in other users' phones) with a backhaul connection and a wireless interface (such as Bluetooth/Wi-Fi, and down the road femtocells) to communicate with the phones. Given a large number of such low-cost, short range access points, the mango network delivers content to the very edge of the network, within a few feet from the user Such a content delivery architecture is faster, cheaper, and can support a much larger number of users than macrocellular data networks. In this paper we present the mango service architecture, discuss technical challenges to shorten download times and lower content delivery costs, and outline our plans to develop and deploy this service. We also discuss a variety of interesting applications and services that can be deployed over the core mango system. (C) 2011 Alcatel-Lucent.