The role of cloudlets in hostile environments

The convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing assumes that the cloud is easily accessible at all times. In other words, there is good end-to-end network quality and few network or cloud failures. Unfortunately, this assumption is untenable in several important contexts that we collectively refer to as hostile environments. The prime example of a hostile environment is a theater of military operations. Another example is a geographical region where recovery is under way after a natural disaster or terrorist attack. A third example is a developing country with weak networking infrastructure. More generally, even a well-connected region of the public Internet may become a hostile environment under conditions of cyber attack. In this talk I will explore how cloudlets, orginally motivated by narrow considerations of end-to-end latency, can play a much broader and more foundational role for mobile computing in hostile environments. We advocate a design strategy in which a cloudlet is completely transparent under normal conditions, giving mobile users the illusion that they are directly interacting with the cloud; under failure conditions, the cloudlet masks the absence of the cloud by performing its essential services.