Tactical Cloudlets: Moving Cloud Computing to the Edge

Grazed from CMU.edu. Author: Grace Lewis.

Soldiers in battle or emergency workers responding to a disaster often find themselves in environments with limited computing resources, rapidly-changing mission requirements, high levels of stress, and limited connectivity, which are often referred to as “tactical edge environments.” These types of scenarios make it hard to use mobile software applications that would be of value to a soldier or emergency personnel, including speech and image recognition, natural language processing, and situational awareness, since these computation-intensive tasks take a heavy toll on a mobile device’s battery power and computing resources.

As part of the Advanced Mobile Systems Initiative at the Carnegie Mellon University Software Engineering Institute (SEI), my research has focused on cyber foraging, which uses discoverable, forward-deployed servers to extend the capabilities of mobile devices by offloading expensive (battery draining) computations to more powerful resources that can be accessed in the cloud, or for staging data particular to a mission…

This blog post is the latest installment in a series on how my research uses tactical cloudlets as a strategy for providing infrastructure to support computation offload and data staging at the tactical edge…

Read more from the source @ http://blog.sei.cmu.edu/post.cfm/cloudlets-cloud-computing-edge-314