RainCloud - Cloudlet Selection for Effective Cyber Foraging

Cyber foraging is a technique in which devices (like mobile phones) that have lesser computing resources make use of those at other resource-rich devices. Offloading computation to a nearby device (a cloudlet) rather than some remote server, has proved to be beneficial for several resource-intensive mobile applications (apps) like online-gaming, video streaming and face recognition. While techniques to offload applications such that the load on the cloudlets is balanced have been proposed, we believe that one rule does not fit all types of applications. In this paper, we propose RainCloud, a cloudlet selection heuristic with dynamic VM provisioning for effective cyber foraging. RainCloud ranks cloudlets based on their available system#x002F;network resources (capabilities), specifically depending on the resources required by the application. It also looks for a relatively stable cloudlet so that the app may run to completion before the cloudlet moves out of range of the mobile device. We tested this heuristic on a small testbed and verified that it improves application response time and QoS (in terms of jitter). We also noted that RainCloud reduces the startup time, which is the time taken for the transmission and synthesis of the VM required to run the app on the cloudlet.