HyCloud: a hybrid approach toward offloading cellular content through opportunistic communication

The rapid proliferation of smartphones and the urge to offload mobile data is paving the way to blend the communication capabilities of cellular and opportunistic networks for delivering content. By exploiting the locality of users interested in the same content, the vision of HyCloud project is to design and implement a hybrid architecture where content dissemination through opportunistic communication among several clients is controlled by the online cloud. Based on the foundation of our key theoretical findings, we are implementing a prototype architecture running on Windows Phone 8 mobile devices, taking advantage of the Windows Azure cloud platform.