A Survey of Cloudlet Based Mobile Computing

Nowadays, mobile devices are ubiquitous in people's everyday life and applications on mobile devices are becoming increasingly resource-hungry. However, the resources on mobile devices are limited. Mobile cloud computing addresses the resource scarcity problem of mobile devices by offloading computation and/or data from mobile devices into the cloud. In the converging progress of mobile computing and cloud computing, the cloudlet is an important complement to the client-cloud hierarchy. This paper presents an extensive survey of researches on cloudlet based mobile computing. We first retrospect the evolution of cloudlet based mobile computing. After that, we review the existing works on cloudlet based computation offloading and data offloading. Then we introduce two examples of commercial cloudlet products. At last, we discuss the current situation, the challenges and future directions of this area.