HyCast-Podcast Discovery in Mobile Networks

Podcasts are a popular way to provide multimedia information about certain topics. A multitude of podcast servers exist in the Internet, allowing people to subscribe to them. Typically, podcasts are downloaded onto desktop computers and copied on mobile devices to be played while being on the move. In this paper, we extend the idea of podcasts, making them available in mobile network environments. In particular, HyCast does not rely on central podcast directories. Instead, HyCast also allows discovering, subscribing to, and downloading podcasts and episodes in the local neighborhood. For the dissemination of podcast information, we introduce and evaluate two different strategies. One is based on peer-to-peer communication between one-hop neighbors. The second one employs clustering to reduce the overhead of the podcast information dissemination.