Allocation Algorithms for Autonomous Management of Collaborative Cloudlets

Mobile applications are evolving towards support for advanced interactivity and resource-demanding multimedia features. Mobile platforms are however struggling to cope with these new innovative application concepts, such as Augmented Reality, due to the inherent limitations on their available resources, such as CPU, memory and battery power. Offloading resource-intensive calculations to nearby infrastructure or devices, also known as cloudlets, has emerged as a viable alternative in offering interactive and resource-intensive applications to mobile users. This concept of resource sharing provides promising opportunities for collaborative scenarios in which not only data processing, but also the data itself are shared between multiple users. In this paper, we investigate the challenges posed by offloading collaborative mobile applications. We describe the problem of autonomous management of collaborative cloudlets and propose two heuristic algorithms, Simulated Annealing and Steepest Descent, in order to solve this optimization problem. We observe that these heuristics yield an effectiveness of more than 90% for execution times that are three orders of magnitude lower when compared to a guaranteed-optimal approach.