Mobile, collaborative augmented reality using cloudlets

The evolution in mobile applications to support advanced interactivity and demanding multimedia features is still ongoing. Novel application concepts (e.g. mobile Augmented Reality (AR)) are however hindered by the inherently limited resources available on mobile platforms (not withstanding the dramatic performance increases of mobile hardware). Offloading resource intensive application components to the cloud, also known as "cyber foraging", has proven to be a valuable solution in a variety of scenarios. However, also for collaborative scenarios, in which data together with its processing are shared between multiple users, this offloading concept is highly promising. In this paper, we investigate the challenges posed by offloading collaborative mobile applications. We present a middleware platform capable of autonomously deploying software components to minimize average CPU load, while guaranteeing smooth collaboration. As a use case, we present and evaluate a collaborative AR application, offering interaction between users, the physical environment as well as with the virtual objects superimposed on this physical environment

Leveraging cloudlets for immersive collaborative applications

To enable immersive applications on mobile devices, the authors propose a component-based cyber foraging framework that optimizes application-specific metrics by not only offloading but also configuring application components at runtime. It also enables collaborative scenarios by sharing components between multiple devices

A Low-Energy Fast Cyber Foraging Mechanism for Mobile Devices

The ever increasing demands for using resource-constrained mobile devices for running more resource intensive applications nowadays has initiated the development of cyber foraging solutions that offload parts or whole computational intensive tasks to more powerful surrogate stationary computers and run them on behalf of mobile devices as required. The choice of proper mix of mobile devices and surrogates has remained an unresolved challenge though. In this paper, we propose a new decision-making mechanism for cyber foraging systems to select the best locations to run an application, based on context metrics such as the specifications of surrogates, the specifications of mobile devices, application specification, and communication network specification. Experimental results show faster response time and lower energy consumption of benched applications compared to when applications run wholly on mobile devices and when applications are offloaded to surrogates blindly for execution.Comment: 12 pages, 7 figures, International Journal of Wireless & Mobile Networks (IJWMN