D-CLOC: A Delay Tolerant Cloud Formation Using Context-Aware Mobile Crowdsourcing

Gathering information and providing remote assistant is a common trend as it saves time and cost associated with visiting the actual location in person. The widely available mobile sensors are used in collecting information during a task processing. However, gathering information from a remote place, or an area of disaster, is not trivial, given the unavailability of appropriate infrastructure. Existing delay tolerant networking approaches address this issue but suffer from unsatisfactory performance due to the lack of sufficient user participation. We propose the Delay-tolerant Cloud Computing framework (D-CLOC), a cloud framework utilizing the contextual information of a mobile client. Our proposed architecture combines crowdsourcing and the cellular network and forms a temporal delay tolerant cloud. D-CLOC uses a bidding incentive model to ensure and promote user participation in the cloud. We provide a detailed reasoning of the security and feasibility of our model, and delineate probable approaches for solving the various security related aspects. The paper includes the design and implementation of a realistic-simulation model for D-CLOC. The simulation scenario incorporates an example face recognition task for evaluating the performance of our proposed model. Our experimental results show that D-CLOC performs quite well compared to some of the existing DTN approaches and can be deployed for solving any real life problems using crowdsourcing within a delay tolerant cloud infrastructure.