Moving from clouds to mobile clouds to satisfy the demand of mobile user generated content

Current opinion and debate surrounding capacity bottlenecks in mobile systems that is being fuelled by user generated content and video is persuasive. As a result, the academic community and the equipment manufacturers have focused on addressing this problem by developing techniques for off-loading traffic to other networks when they are available and upgrading infrastructure by traditional methods. But, these solutions are not sustainable as they are expensive and only shift the bottlenecks from one part of the network to another if we continue to move towards the centralized architectures that are promoted by the cloud computing vision. In this paper, we argue that a sustainable solution has to leverage off the enormous capabilities of the next generation mobile devices and the “social habits” of the users who generate content. Then we present an overview of such as solution, MobiTribe, a mobile content distribution architecture which enables a controlled trade-off between control, availability and cost for both users and mobile operators.