Weighting Past on the Geo-Aware State Deployment Problem

The geographical barrier between mobile devices and mobile application servers (typically hosted in the Cloud) imposes an unavoidable latency and jitter that negatively impacts the performance of modern mobile systems. Fog Computing architectures can mitigate this impact if there is a middleware service able to correctly partition and deploy the state of an application at optimal locations. Geo-aware state deployment is challenging as it must consider the mobility of the devices and the dependencies arising when multiple devices concurrently manipulate the same application state. This paper proposes a range of new object-graph-based strategies for geo-aware state deployment. In particular, the paper focuses on understanding the role of preserving previously observed associations between state items on application performance.