  Collaborative uploading describes a type of crowdsourcing scenario in
networked environments where a device utilizes multiple paths over neighboring
devices to upload content to a centralized processing entity such as a cloud
service. Intermediate devices may aggregate and preprocess this data stream.
Such scenarios arise in the composition and aggregation of information, e.g.,
from smartphones or sensors. We use a queuing theoretic description of the
collaborative uploading scenario, capturing the ability to split data into
chunks that are then transmitted over multiple paths, and finally merged at the
destination. We analyze replication and allocation strategies that control the
mapping of data to paths and provide closed-form expressions that pinpoint the
optimal strategy given a description of the paths' service distributions.
Finally, we provide an online path-aware adaptation of the allocation strategy
that uses statistical inference to sequentially minimize the expected waiting
time for the uploaded data. Numerical results show the effectiveness of the
adaptive approach compared to the proportional allocation and a variant of the
join-the-shortest-queue allocation, especially for bursty path conditions.
