BlueFall: Testing swarming protocols through mobile phones

In recent years, the number of appliances connected to the Interned has steadily increased thanks to the wide popularity of WiFi/3G enabled mobile devices. This has led to an increase of multimedia resource consumption, causing traffic overload problems for classic resource providers. Different solutions have been studied to shift this traffic overhead from the server(s) towards the client(s) through the employment of the so called swarming protocols. However, most of these solutions have been verified only through simulations. While simulations consist in a necessary first step, they can be far from the actual outcome of employing real protocols and devices. To this end, in this paper we describe BlueFall, an application that could allow to test swarming protocols using actual mobile phones. Pursuing our goal, we provide some preliminary evidence on two simple swarming schemes we have implemented in our testbed.