DroidCloudlet: Towards cloudlet-based computing using mobile devices

With the increasing ubiquity of mobile devices with computational capabilities comparable to many personal computers, while at the same time, wireless connectivity is almost available everywhere, researchers started to explore how to make use of that huge amount of potential aggregated computing resources. However, mobile devices still suffer short battery life, especially with their newly large screens and the spread use of applications which need GPS or sensors' readings. Moreover, not all mobile devices are capable of running rich-media and data-intensive applications. Offloading to the cloud is a promising solution, however, long WAN latencies and the larger amount of consumed energy using cellular data connectivity guided researchers to bring cloud capabilities to local area networks to form cloudlets. In this paper, we propose a cloudlet architecture in which, any available mobile device with abundant processing or power resources, can participate as a server. Offloading is carried out dynamically at runtime according to specific policies that target reducing execution time and/or saving battery. We also propose a scheme to enable applications' developers to select which parts of their code should be offloaded and parallelized among different available servers.