6th International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services

Research Article

On-Demand VM Provisioning for Cloudlet-Based Cyber-Foraging in Resource-Constrained Engironments

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  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.4108/icst.mobicase.2014.257768,
        author={Sebasti\^{a}n Echeverr\^{\i}a and James Root and Ben Bradshaw and Grace Lewis},
        title={On-Demand VM Provisioning for Cloudlet-Based Cyber-Foraging in Resource-Constrained Engironments},
        proceedings={6th International Conference on Mobile Computing, Applications and Services},
        publisher={IEEE},
        proceedings_a={MOBICASE},
        year={2014},
        month={11},
        keywords={cyber-foraging cloud computing mobile computing monbile cloud computing virtual machine provisioning cloudlets software architecture configuration management},
        doi={10.4108/icst.mobicase.2014.257768}
    }
    
  • Sebastián Echeverría
    James Root
    Ben Bradshaw
    Grace Lewis
    Year: 2014
    On-Demand VM Provisioning for Cloudlet-Based Cyber-Foraging in Resource-Constrained Engironments
    MOBICASE
    IEEE
    DOI: 10.4108/icst.mobicase.2014.257768
Sebastián Echeverría1, James Root1, Ben Bradshaw1,*, Grace Lewis1
  • 1: Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute
*Contact email: bwbradshaw@sei.cmu.edu

Abstract

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.