Crowd-Sourcing Mobile Devices to Develop Edge Clouds

Mobile devices have traditionally been viewed as thin clients or edge devices that serve primarily as user-input devices. With technology advances, they now have the potential to be viewed as thick clients or even as thin servers. Given the proliferation and enhanced capabilities of mobile devices, the realisation of a wireless cloud of nearby smartphones is within grasp. The Hyrax project proposes a novel vision of a hyperlocal edge-cloud, i.e., a computational/storage cloud comprised solely of a collection of nearby wireless edge devices, with the purpose of pooling these devices’ data and processing power to support a new class of proximity-aware applications.