Context Awareness over Transient Clouds

The exponential increase in the number and types of mobile devices, along with their ever-growing sets of capabilities, have enabled the development of new architectures that aim to harness such heterogeneity. Transient Clouds (TCs) are examples of mobile clouds which are created on-the-fly by the devices present in an environment to share their physical resources (e.g., CPU, memory, network) and would disappear as the nodes leave the network. They enable a device to go beyond its own physical limitations through utilizing the capabilities offered by nearby devices over an ad-hoc network. In this paper we present a Transient Context-Aware Cloud (TCAC) in which the nodes of the network care more about providing/learning higher level functionalities rather than lower level capabilities. We make the case for such an architecture in scenarios where it is not feasible for all the nodes to compute the context due to privacy, energy, and delay constraints rather than an unreachable network.We present a prototype implementation of our architecture over Android smartphones connected via WiFi along with the performance metrics (power/energy consumption and accuracy)to show the benefits of context awareness in TCs.