Soldiers and front-line personnel operating in tactical environments increasingly make use of handheld devices to help with tasks such as face recognition, language translation, decision-making, and mission planning. These resourceconstrained edge environments are characterized by dynamic context, limited computing resources, high levels of stress, and intermittent network connectivity. Cyber-foraging is the leverage of external resource-rich surrogates to augment the capabilities of resource-limited devices. In cloudlet-based cyber-foraging, resource-intensive computation and data is offloaded to cloudlets. Forward-deployed, discoverable, virtual-machine-based tactical cloudlets can be hosted on vehicles or other platforms to provide infrastructure to offload computation, provide forward data staging for a mission, perform data filtering to remove unnecessary data from streams intended for dismounted users, and serve as collection points for data heading for enterprise repositories. This paper describes tactical cloudlets and presents experimentation results for five different cloudlet provisioning mechanisms. The goal is to demonstrate that cyber-foraging in tactical environments is possible by moving cloud computing concepts and technologies closer to the edge so that tactical cloudlets, even if disconnected from the enterprise, can provide capabilities that can lead to enhanced situational awareness and decision making at the edge.
First responders and others operating in crisis environments increasingly make use of handheld devices to help with tasks such as face recognition, language translation, decision-making and mission planning. These resource-constrained edge environments are characterized by dynamic context, limited computing resources, high levels of stress, and intermittent network connectivity. Cyber-foraging is the leverage of external resourcerich surrogates to augment the capabilities of resource-limited devices. In cloudlet-based cyber-foraging, resource-intensive computation is offloaded to cloudlets -discoverable, generic servers located in single-hop proximity of mobile devices. This paper presents several strategies for cloudlet-based cyber-foraging and encourages research in this area to consider a tradeoff space beyond energy, performance and fidelity of results.
Mobile applications are increasingly used by first responders, medics, researchers and other people in the field support of their missions and tasks. These environments have very limited connectivity and computing resources. Cloudletbased cyber-foraging is a method of opportunistically discovering nearby resource-rich nodes that can increase the computing power of mobile devices and enhance the mobile applications running on them. In this paper we present On-Demand VM Provisioning, a mechanism for provisioning cloudlets at runtime by leveraging the advantages of enterprise provisioning tools commonly used to maintain configurations in enterprise environments. We present details of a prototype for On-Demand VM Provisioning and the results of a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the prototype compared to other cloudlet provisioning mechanisms. The evaluation shows that On-Demand VM Provisioning shows promise in terms of flexibility, energy consumption, maintainability and leverage of cloud computing best practices, but can be challenging in disconnected environments, especially for complex applications with many dependencies.
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