Characterization of Cyber-foraging Usage Contexts

Cyber-foraging is a technique to enable mobile devices to extend their computing power and storage by offloading computation or data to more powerful servers located in the cloud or in single-hop proximity. There are many domains and applications that can benefit from the longer battery life and better application performance on mobile devices that is typically associated to the use of cyber-foraging, such as field operations, sensor systems, and entertainment. However, obtaining these benefits in operational systems requires meeting functional and non-functional requirements that vary depending on the usage context of the cyber-foraging system. This paper presents a characterization of usage contexts for cyber-foraging defined in terms of functional and non-functional requirements for cyber-foraging systems. The goal of the characterization is to provide context for software engineering life cycle activities for cyber-foraging systems, such as requirements engineering, software architecture and quality assurance, with the intent of developing systems that fully realize the benefits of cyber-foraging.