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.

I. Introduction

Mobile applications are increasingly used by first responders and other field personnel in support of their missions and tasks. These environments are not only at the edge of the network infrastructure, but are also resource-constrained due to limited computing resources, intermittent network connectivity, and in some cases dynamic context and high levels of stress. Applications that are useful to field personnel include speech and image recognition, natural language processing, sensor data collection, and situational awareness. These are all computation-intensive tasks that take a heavy toll on the device's battery power and computing resources.