Cloudlet-based cyber-foraging for mobile systems in resource-constrained edge environments

First responders and others operating in crisis environments increasingly make use of handheld devices to help with tasks such as face recognition, language translation, decision-making and mission planning. These resource-constrained edge environments are characterized by dynamic context, limited computing resources, high levels of stress, and intermittent network connectivity. Cyber-foraging is the leverage of external resourcerich surrogates to augment the capabilities of resource-limited devices. In cloudlet-based cyber-foraging, resource-intensive computation is offloaded to cloudlets-discoverable, generic servers located in single-hop proximity of mobile devices. This paper presents several strategies for cloudlet-based cyber-foraging and encourages research in this area to consider a tradeoff space beyond energy, performance and fidelity of results. Copyright © 2014 ACM.