Characterizing the effects of sharing hardware resources in mobile collaboration scenarios

Advances in wireless communication systems and mobile devices allow nomad users to participate in mobile collaborative activities. However the availability of hardware resources in the mobile devices participating in the collaboration process enhances or jeopardizes such activity. This paper studies how the network topology and the hardware resources distributed into a mobile network influence the collaboration activities among the participants. Several simulations were done to try to understand this issue. The obtained results show that in mobile collaboration scenarios involving a high number of resources-constraint mobile devices (e.g. handhelds), the maximum cooperation among node is obtained in a small world network topology. The results also show that another factor that encourages cooperation among nodes is the network size.