In such cases the use of an opportunistic network [19] may help
to improve the availability and accessibility of information using
co-located user’s to relay information instead of relying on fixed
infrastructure for communication. Nodes in an opportunistic network
communicate with each other with the help of other nodes.
Human interaction is one of the major parts of such communication
as the opportunity of forwarding any message depends on their
nature and behaviour of the said interaction [7]. By using opportunistic
networks it may be possible to overcome the limitations of
high Internet access costs or unavailability of network infrastructure,
e.g., for tourists who may wish to gain access to remote cloud
applications with the help of local users’ mobile phones.
This paper aims to address the following research questions:
1. Is it possible to use an opportunistic network to provide cloud
services to tourists that lack access to network infrastructure?
2. Does the mobility and social interactions of local users help to
send tourists’ information efficiently?
3. Do local users’ mobile networks succeed at integrating tourists’
and cloud networks successfully to build an integrated opportunistic
mobile cloud platform?
The goal of this paper is two-fold. First we investigate how to
build an opportunistic mobile cloud infrastructure for tourists with
the help of the local users’ mobile communications that can enable
sending or retrieving of data to or from the cloud. Second we use
opportunistic mobile cloud scenario to investigate efficient routing
algorithms for tourists to access the remote cloud applications.
The contributions of this paper are as follows:
1. We introduce a “Device to Device to Cloud” architecture, which
enables tourists to use cloud applications without any Internet
connection;
2. We devise a new tourist-based mobility model according to user
behaviour, nature of travel and activities in different places;
3. We evaluate two options for sending tourists’ data into the cloud:
storing data at well-situated hubs and by exploiting the mobility
of local users. Our results show that leverage local users’
mobility improves message delivery performance.
The rest of the paper is organised as follows. Section 2 describes
related work. Section 3 outlines our proposed architecture. We
describe our simulations for evaluating different forwarding techniques
in Section 4, followed by the results. We discu