Software Engineering Institute

Modern mobile devices create new opportunities to interact with their surrounding environment, but their computational power and battery capacity is limited. Code offloading to external servers located in clouds or data centers can help overcome these limitations. However, in hostile environments it is not possible to guarantee reliable networks. Consequently, stable cloud access is not available. Cyber foraging is a technique for offloading resource-intensive tasks from mobile devices to resource-rich surrogate machines in close wireless proximity. One type of surrogate machine is a cloudlet—a generic server that runs one or more virtual machines (VMs) located in single-hop distance to the mobile device. Cloudlet-based cyber foraging can compensate for missing cloud access in hostile environments. One strategy for cloudlet provisioning is VM synthesis. Unfortunately, this method is time consuming and battery draining because it requires large file transfers. In this podcast, researcher Grace Lewis discusses application virtualization as a more lightweight alternative to VM synthesis for cloudlet provisioning.