Cloudlets: at the leading edge of mobile-cloud convergence

As mobile computing and cloud computing converge, the sensing and interaction capabilities of mobile devices can be seamlessly fused with compute-intensive and data-intensive processing in the cloud. Cloudlets are important architectural components in this convergence, representing the middle tier of a mobile device — cloudlet — cloud hierarchy. We show how cloudlets enable a new genre of applications called cognitive assistance applications that augment human perception and cognition. We describe a plug-and-play architecture for cognitive assistance, and a proof of concept using Google Glass.