Benefits and Limitations of Cloudlets in the Mobile Cloud Architecture

Anjali Kalawon MSE12PT 120467

Abstract This work gives a brief description of cloudlets and their application, and their benefits and limitations in the mobile cloud architecture.

II.
State

CLOUDLET VS CLOUD
Cloudlet Only soft state Cloud Hard and soft state Professionally administered, 24x7 operator

I.

INTRODUCTION

Smart phones are dominating the mobile phone industry nowadays. Fortunately, technology advances fast enough to meet the expectations of these devices. Nonetheless, mobile devices will always have restrictions such as battery life, weight, size and heat dissipation. These restrictions cause limitations on computational resources and constrain resources on mobile devices that are less present in non-mobile devices. Hence mobile devices have much limitation if they have to execute rich media and data analysis applications that require heavy computation [3]. One solution to overcome these resource limitations is mobile computing. A cloudlet is a trusted, resource-rich computer or cluster of computers that is well-connected to the Internet and is available for use by nearby mobile devices [2]. The concept of cloudlets was introduced in order to cope with high WAN latency which makes the cloud an insufficient approach for real-time applications.

Management Self-managed; little to no professional attention Environment Datacenter in a box at business premises

Machine room with power conditioning and cooling Ownership Decentralised Centralised ownership by ownership by local business Amazon, Yahoo!, etc. Network LAN Internet latency/bandwidth latency/bandwidth Sharing Few users at a 100s 1000s of time users at a time Key Differences between Cloudlet and Cloud

III.

BENEFITS

Rather than relying on a distant cloud, the resource poverty of a mobile device can be addressed by using a nearby resource-rich cloudlet [2]. The mobile device functions as a thin client, with all significant computation occurring in the nearby cloudlet [2]. A cloudlet can be viewed as a data center in a box. It is self-managing, requiring little more
1

than power, Internet connectivity, and access control for setup. This simplicity of management corresponds to an appliance model of computing resources, and makes it trivial to deploy on a business premises such as a coffee shop or a doctors office [2]. A cloudlet only contains soft state such as cache copies of data or code that is available elsewhere. Loss or destruction of a cloudlet is hence not catastrophic [2]. Cloudlets solve the issue of high latency because the contents of the cloud are mirrored and cached in the cloudlets, which are closer to the mobile users. They may also buffer data such as videos from the mobile devices to the cloud. Cloudlets are discoverable, localized and stateless, running on one or more virtual machines on which mobile devices can offload expensive computations. This enhances processing capacity and conserves battery power, which leads to much energysaving. Cloudlets are able to communicate messages between themselves through cloudlet hopping, making most local services available even if the user is on the move.

worst case, solely its own resources. Full functionality and performance can return later, when a nearby cloudlet is discovered [2]. Although cloudlets may solve the issue of latency, there are still two important drawbacks of the VM based cloudlet approach (by Satyanarayanan [2]) [3]. One remains dependent on service providers to actually deploy such cloudlet infrastructure in LAN networks. The coarse granularity of VMs as unit of distribution. Instead of executing the whole application remotely in the VM and using a thin client protocol, better performance can be achieved by dynamically partitioning the application in components.

Also, as resources in the cloudlet will still be limited, chances are that even the cloudlet runs out of resources when many users execute their VM simultaneously on the cloudlet infrastructure.

V.
[1] [2]

REFERENCES

IV.

LIMITATIONS
[3]

Physical proximity of the cloudlet is essential because the end-to-end response time of applications executing in the cloudlet needs to be fast (few milliseconds) and predictable. If no cloudlet is available nearby, the mobile device can gracefully degrade to a fallback mode that involves a distant cloud or, in the
2

Koukoumidis, E. et al. (2011). Pocket Cloudlets. ACM. Satyanarayanan, M. et al. (2009). The Case for VM-based Cloudlets in Mobile Computing. IEEE. Verbelen, T. et al. (2012). Cloudlets: Bringing the cloud to the mobile user. ACM.