Accelerating Mobile-Cloud Computing : A Survey

With the recent advances in cloud computing and the capabilities of mobile devices, the state-of-the-art of mobile computing is at an inflection point, where compute-intensive applications can now run on today's mobile devices with limited computational capabilities. This is achieved by using the communications capabilities of mobile devices to establish high-speed connections to vast computational resources located in the cloud. While the execution scheme based on this mobile-cloud collaboration opens the door to many applications that can tolerate response times on the order of seconds and minutes, it proves to be an inadequate platform for running applications demanding real-time response within a fraction of a second. In this chapter, the authors describe the state-of-the-art in mobile-cloud computing as well as the challenges faced by traditional approaches in terms of their latency and energy efficiency. They also introduce the use of cloudlets as an approach for extending the utility of mobile-cloud computing by providing compute and storage resources accessible at the edge of the network, both for end processing of applications as well as for managing the distribution of applications to other distributed compute resources.