COAST: A Cooperative Storage Framework for Mobile Transparent Computing Using Device-to-Device Data Sharing

TC is a promising network computing paradigm that offers an efficient way to make lightweight terminals more powerful, convenient, and secure. TC's execution model separates data storage and application execution, letting terminals load applications from TC servers on demand via the Internet. With this approach, the network's performance significantly affects the TC applications' performance. To enhance TC applications' performance, existing research typically deploys many cache servers on the Internet. However, such caching techniques are not ideal in a mobile environment, where the wireless networks that mobile terminals use for Internet access are expensive and have limited bandwidth. To address this problem, we propose COAST, a cooperative storage framework for MTC. Based on a deviceto- device data-sharing technique, COAST enables a mobile terminal to fetch applications from nearby terminals without accessing the Internet. In this article, we introduce COAST's design, explore the opportunities and challenges of cooperative storage in MTC environments, and identify future research directions.