Cloudlet-Based Cyber-Foraging in Resource-Limited 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-limited environments are characterized by dynamic context, limited computing resources, high levels of stress, and intermittent network connectivity. Cyber-foraging is the leverage of external resource-rich surrogates to augment the capabilities of resource-limited devices. In cloudletbased cyber-foraging, resource-intensive computation is offloaded to cloudlets: discoverable, generic servers located in single-hop proximity of mobile devices. This chapter presents several mechanisms for cloudlet-based cyber-foraging that consider a tradeoff space beyond energy, performance, and fidelity of results. It demonstrates that cyber-foraging in resource-limited environments can greatly benefit from moving cloud computing concepts and technologies closer to the edge so that surrogates, even if disconnected from the enterprise, can provide offload capabilities that enhance the computing power of mobile devices