Software Engineering Institute

February 10, 2017—Building on years of research and development in the area of tactical cloudlets, the SEI recently released version 3.0 of its implementation of tactical cloudlets, KD-Cloudlet. Cloudlets are discoverable, generic, stateless servers located in single-hop proximity of mobile devices that can operate in disconnected mode. Because they are virtual-machine (VM) based, cloudlets promote flexibility, mobility, scalability, and elasticity. As with prior releases, the KD-Cloudlet software is freely available on GitHub.

Tactical cloudlets can be hosted in the field on vehicles or other platforms to provide

• infrastructure to offload computation from mobile devices
• forward-data-staging for a mission
• data filtering to remove unnecessary data from streams intended for dismounted warfighters
• collection points for data heading for enterprise repositories

“After the initial release of the KD-Cloudlet code in April 2015, Version 2.0 was released in December 2015 to include capabilities for establishing trust between mobile devices and cloudlets. The cloudlet acts as a Key Generation Center and relies on physical proximity to mobile devices to exchange keys. These keys are then used to protect all communication between the mobile device and the cloudlet. In Version 3.0 we extended this concept to also protect communication between cloudlets,” said the SEI’s Grace Lewis.

Lewis noted that version 3.0 of KD-Cloudlet contains code for secure VM migration between tactical cloudlets also based on secure key generation and exchange in the field. This enhancement addresses the mobility of cloudlets in the field, as well as in dynamic missions, wherein a mobile user of a cloudlet might need to migrate active capabilities to another trusted cloudlet.

The new version of KD-Cloudlet also includes an OSv version of the speech recognition application to demonstrate the use of tactical cloudlets with small-sized VMs.

Release details are available at https://github.com/SEI-AMS/pycloud/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md.

Interested developers can download the code from the SEI GitHub repository: https://github.com/SEI-AMS/pycloud/wiki.

To learn more about the SEI’s work in tactical cloudlets, visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/mobilecomputing/research/tactical-cloudlets/index.cfm.