Tactical Cloudlets

December 2014 • Podcast

Grace Lewis Interviewer Suzanne Miller

In this podcast, Grace Lewis discusses five approaches that her team developed and tested for using tactical cloudlets as a strategy for providing infrastructure to support computation offload and data staging at the tactical edge.

We compared the five cloudlet provisioning mechanisms in terms of—from a quantitative prospective—payload size, energy consumption, and also application-ready-time, which we define as the moment from which I say I need this capability until when the cloudlet says the capability is ready. In addition to that, we did a qualitative comparison because, again it is not just about the numbers.

Publisher:

Software Engineering Institute

Subjects

Pervasive Mobile ComputingPervasive Mobile Computing

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Abstract

Soldiers in battle or emergency workers responding to a disaster often find themselves in environments with limited computing resources, rapidly-changing mission requirements, high levels of stress, and limited connectivity, which are often referred to as “tactical edge environments.” These types of scenarios make it hard to use mobile software applications that would be of value to soldiers or emergency personnel, including speech and image recognition, natural language processing, and situational awareness, because these computation-intensive tasks take a heavy toll on a mobile device’s battery power and computing resources. Researchers in the Advanced Mobile Systems Initiative at the SEI focus on cyber foraging, which uses discoverable, forward-deployed servers to extend the capabilities of mobile devices by offloading battery-draining computations to these more powerful resources, or for staging data particular to a mission. In this podcast, Grace Lewis discusses five approaches that her team developed and tested for using tactical cloudlets as a strategy for providing infrastructure to support computation offload and data staging at the tactical edge.

About the Speaker

Grace A. Lewis is the deputy lead for the SEI's Advanced Mobile Systems Initiative and the technical lead for the Edge-Enabled Tactical Systems research team, which works on a number of projects related to mobile systems at the edge. Her main interests are mobile computing, service-oriented architecture, and cloud computing. Lewis has more than 25 years of professional software development experiencein industry and research environments. Before joining the SEI, Lewis was chief of systems development for Icesi University, where she served as project manager and technical lead for the university-wide administrative systems.

Suzanne Miller

Software Engineering Institute