Leveraging Cloudlets for Immersive Collaborative Applications

Cyber foraging has already proven to be successful for enabling resource-intensive applications on mobile devices. Offloading applications, or parts thereof, to nearby infrastructure - also denoted as cloudlets - can lower execution time and save energy. However, in view of immersive applications, two challenges still remain. First, due to the real-time constraints of immersive applications, optimizing generic metrics such as execution time or energy isn´t sufficient. The authors thus propose a component-based cyber foraging framework that optimizes application-specific metrics not only by offloading but also by configuring application components at runtime. Second, because immersive applications tend to process location-aware data, much processing is replicated when multiple users are in the same environment. Therefore, the framework also enables collaborative scenarios by sharing components between multiple devices.