The Case for Mobile Edge-Clouds

Current mobile applications treat the end-user device as a "thin client," with all of the heavy computations being offloaded to an infrastructure cloud. However, the computational capabilities of mobile devices are constantly improving, and it is worthwhile considering whether an edge-cloud that consists purely of mobile devices (operating effectively as "thick clients") can perform as well as, or even better than, an infrastructure cloud. In this paper, we study the trade-offs between offloading computation to an infrastructure cloud versus retaining the computation within a mobile edge-cloud. To this end, we develop and run two classes of applications on both types of clouds, and we analyze the performance of the two clouds in terms of the time taken to run the application, along with the total amount of battery power consumed in both cases. Our results indicate that there are indeed classes of applications where an edge-cloud can outperform an infrastructure cloud in terms of both latency and battery power.