Cooperative video provisioning in mobile wireless environments

In the last years, the wireless Internet has received growing and growing attention pushed by the unprecedented and mass-market spread of mobile devices: smartphones, tablets, and netbooks are widely and increasingly exploited to access the Internet from everywhere, in a ubiquitous manner. Initially, mobile devices were primarily used to surf the web and access contents managed by traditional servers connected to the fixed Internet via wide-bandwidth links. In other words, users exploited their mobile devices similar to what they were used to do with their desktops, with the only but notable differences that, in the case of mobile devices, (a) users were not tied to fixed locations and (b) devices usually had limited hardware/software capabilities, e.g., making harder to render HTML pages designed for highresolution and large displays.

In the last years, the wireless Internet has received evergrowing attention resulted from the unprecedented and mass-market spread of mobile devices: smartphones, tablets, and netbooks are widely and increasingly exploited to access the Internet from everywhere, in a ubiquitous manner. Initially, mobile devices were primarily used to surf the web and access contents managed by traditional servers connected to the fixed Internet via wide-bandwidth links. In other words, users exploited their mobile devices similar to what they were used to do with their desktops, with the only but notable differences that, in the case of mobile devices, (a) users were not tied to fixed locations and (b) devices usually had limited hardware/software 248capabilities, e.g., making harder to render HTML pages designed for high-resolution and large displays.