Soumya Simanta

The Role of Cloudlets in Hostile Environments

The convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing is predicated on a reliable, high-bandwidth end-to-end network. This basic requirement is hard to guarantee in hostile environments such as military operations and disaster recovery. In this article, the authors examine how VM-based cloudlets that are located in close proximity to associated mobile devices can overcome this challenge. This article is part of a special issue on the edge of the cloud.

The Impact of Mobile Multimedia Applications on Data Center Consolidation

The convergence of mobile computing and cloud computing enables new multimedia applications that are both resource-intensive and interaction-intensive. For these applications, end-to-end network bandwidth and latency matter greatly when cloud resources are used to augment the computational power and battery life of a mobile device. We first present quantitative evidence that this crucial design consideration to meet interactive performance criteria limits data center consolidation. We then describe an architectural solution that is a seamless extension of todays cloud computing infrastructure.

Situated Software: Concepts, Motivation, Technology, and the Future

Situated software, a type of opportunistic software, is created by a small subset of users to fulfill a specific purpose. For example, business users have been creating situated software through mashups, which combine data from multiple sources on internal systems or the Internet. Situated software can change the way users access, perceive, and consume information, and can allow users to finally focus on what to do with information, rather than where to find it or how to get to it. However, situated software also has limitations. This article identifies situated softwares role, provides examples of its use, traces the Internets role in its rapid evolution, outlines areas where it is appropriate, describes its limitations, and presents enablers for adopting situated software in an enterprise.

A Reference Architecture for Mobile Code Offload in Hostile Environments

Handheld mobile technology can help disaster relief workers and soldiers in the field with tasks such as speech and image recognition, natural language processing, decision-making, and mission planning. However, these applications are computation-intensive, take a heavy toll on battery power, and often rely on good connectivity to networks, limiting their practical usefulness in a crisis. This paper presents a reference architecture for mobile devices that overcomes these limitations by exploiting cloudlets - VM-based code offload elements that are in single-hop proximity to mobile devices.

SMART: Analyzing the Reuse Potential of Legacy Components in a Service-Oriented Architecture Environment

Abstract : Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular mechanism for achieving interoperability between systems. Because it has characteristics of loose coupling, published interfaces, and a standard communication model, SOA enables existing legacy systems to expose their functionality as services, presumably without making significant changes to the legacy systems. Migration of legacy systems to service-oriented environments has been achieved within a number of domains including banking, electronic payment, and development tools showing that the promise is beginning to be fulfilled. While migration can have significant value, any specific migration requires a concrete analysis of the feasibility, risk, and cost involved. This technical note describes a new release of the Service Migration and Reuse Technique (SMART), which was initially developed in 2005. The Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute (SEI) SMART process helps organizations to make initial decisions about the feasibility of reusing legacy components as services within an SOA environment. SMART considers the specific interactions that will be required by the target SOA environment and any changes that must be made to the legacy components. To achieve this, SMART gathers information about legacy components, the target SOA environment, and candidate services to produce (1) a preliminary analysis of the viability of migrating legacy components to services, (2) an analysis of the migration strategies available, and (3) preliminary estimates of the costs and risks involved in the migration.

Tactical Cloudlets: Moving Cloud Computing to the Edge

Soldiers and front-line personnel operating in tactical environments increasingly make use of handheld devices to help with tasks such as face recognition, language translation, decision-making, and mission planning. These resource constrained edge environments are characterized by dynamic context, limited computing resources, high levels of stress, and intermittent network connectivity. Cyber-foraging is the leverage of external resource-rich surrogates to augment the capabilities of resource-limited devices. In cloudlet-based cyber-foraging, resource-intensive computation and data is offloaded to cloudlets. Forward-deployed, discoverable, virtual-machine-based tactical cloudlets can be hosted on vehicles or other platforms to provide infrastructure to offload computation, provide forward data staging for a mission, perform data filtering to remove unnecessary data from streams intended for dismounted users, and serve as collection points for data heading for enterprise repositories. This paper describes tactical cloudlets and presents experimentation results for five different cloudlet provisioning mechanisms. The goal is to demonstrate that cyber-foraging in tactical environments is possible by moving cloud computing concepts and technologies closer to the edge so that tactical cloudlets, even if disconnected from the enterprise, can provide capabilities that can lead to enhanced situational awareness and decision making at the edge.

Requirements engineering for systems of systems

Traditional requirements engineering for single systems, while remaining a large challenge for engineers, has been extensively researched and many techniques have been proposed and used with varying degree of success. However, many modern systems of systems are being developed to support interaction across multiple controlling authorities and existing techniques are proving to be inadequate for meeting the challenges of requirements engineering for systems of systems. This paper discusses some of these challenges, examines several existing techniques, and discusses how these techniques could be applied to engineer requirements for systems of systems.

Engineering Systems of Systems

Over the past decade, the focus of much effort in systems development has evolved from the development of individual self- contained systems to the integration of large-scale systems of systems (SoS) that are constantly evolving to address new user needs. Because these types of systems of systems no longer have a single controlling authority, have components that are developed and evolve independently, and as a result cannot be specified by a top-down set of requirements, the methods for engineering them need to be modified from the methods for engineering traditional systems. This paper identifies the characteristics of SoS, proposes a SoS life cycle, and identifies some considerations for requirements engineering in an SoS environment.

Cloudlet-based cyber-foraging for mobile systems in resource-constrained edge environments

First responders and others operating in crisis environments increasingly make use of handheld devices to help with tasks such as face recognition, language translation, decision-making and mission planning. These resource-constrained edge environments are characterized by dynamic context, limited computing resources, high levels of stress, and intermittent network connectivity. Cyber-foraging is the leverage of external resource-rich surrogates to augment the capabilities of resource-limited devices. In cloudlet-based cyber-foraging, resource-intensive computation is offloaded to cloudlets – discoverable, generic servers located in single-hop proximity of mobile devices. This paper presents several strategies for cloudlet-based cyber-foraging and encourages research in this area to consider a tradeoff space beyond energy, performance and fidelity of results.

Challenges for assuring quality of service in a service-oriented environment

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) has become an increasingly popular mechanism for achieving business agility and reuse. However, organizations implementing SOA-based solutions are facing new implementation challenges related to validation and verification activities in an SOA environment, especially of runtime system quality attributes such as interoperability, security, reliability, and performance. This position paper presents some of these challenges.