Fog for 5G and IoT

7Elastic Mobile Device Clouds: Leveraging Mobile Devices to Provide Cloud Computing Services at the Edge

KARIM HABAK,¹ CONG SHI,^1,2 ELLEN W. ZEGURA,¹ KHALED A. HARRAS,³ and MOSTAFA AMMAR¹

¹ School of Computer Science, College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

² Current affiliation: Square, Inc., San Francisco, CA, USA

³ Computer Science Department, School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University, Doha, Qatar

7.1 INTRODUCTION

Throughout the last decade, mobile devices have become an indispensable part of every aspect of human life. They are increasingly relied on for various services that go beyond simple connectivity and spread across the usage spectrum from gaming and entertainment applications (e.g., video games) [1] to critical health care applications (e.g., health monitoring) [2]. Although these devices are becoming increasingly capable, a large group of these applications still requires resources that exceed the capabilities of a single mobile device. Therefore, Balan et al. made a case for mobile devices to cyber forage by finding surrogate (i.e., helper) servers in the environment [3]. Since then, the research community has explored various forms of interaction between mobile devices and fixed, higher capacity infrastructure, including the cloud. The motivation for this exploration has been and remains as articulated by Satyanarayanan [4], namely, that mobile devices are resource constrained in comparison with servers and that users ...