On-demand VM provisioning for cloudlet-based cyber-foraging in resource-constrained environments

Mobile applications are increasingly used by first responders, medics, researchers and other people in the field support of their missions and tasks. These environments have very limited connectivity and computing resources. Cloudlet-based cyber-foraging is a method of opportunistically discovering nearby resource-rich nodes that can increase the computing power of mobile devices and enhance the mobile applications running on them. In this paper we present On-Demand VM Provisioning, a mechanism for provisioning cloudlets at runtime by leveraging the advantages of enterprise provisioning tools commonly used to maintain configurations in enterprise environments. We present details of a prototype for On-Demand VM Provisioning and the results of a quantitative and qualitative evaluation of the prototype compared to other cloudlet provisioning mechanisms. The evaluation shows that On-Demand VM Provisioning shows promise in terms of flexibility, energy consumption, maintainability and leverage of cloud computing best practices, but can be challenging in disconnected environments, especially for complex applications with many dependencies.