Behavioral and Structural Analysis of Mobile Cloud Opportunistic Networks
Anh-Dung Nguyen, Patrick Sénac, Michel Diaz · 2014
Opportunistic networks are dynamic networks based on nodes' intermittent contacts. This type of network was shown to be the sole communication means in many extreme situations, especially when an infrastructure-based communication is not possible, for instance, deep space communications, disaster recovery networks, battlefield networks. Opportunistic networks pave the way to a pervasive and universal communication environment in which opportunistic communication can play an important role by its capacity to free users from infrastructure. With the advances of electronic technologies, mobile wireless devices have gradually become more and more powerful in terms of processing, storage and communication capacity. The ever increasing density of mobile wireless devices and sensors that populate the edge of the internet raises the question of the efficient cooperative use of these vast space of resources by leveraging on the spontaneous communication capacity offered for free by the ``mobile cloud'' of edge devices. These ``mobile clouds'', which leverage on opportunistic contacts between users, can potentially deliver free communication, storage and processing services shared between users according to peer to peer resource sharing policies. In this book chapter, we discuss and show how the mobility and the dynamic network structure impact on the processing capacity of mobile cloud opportunistic networks.