Whitepaper: The New Clouds on the Block

We believe that the availability of capable devices at the edge is providing a unique but mostly overlooked opportunity to overcome the traditional cloud computing limitations without the cost of deploying local clouds (cloudlets). We back up this assertion with the four observations. First, while the gap remains between truly mobile devices (handhelds, wearable) and high capacity servers, mobile devices have grown increasingly powerful, especially when laptops are included. Second, the devices at the edge are mostly idle or underutilized and can be clustered together to provide significant compute resource. Third, in many scenarios the aggregate capacities of these idle devices exceed the capabilities of the deployed cloudlet servers. Finally, efficiently utilizing the available devices at the edge as compute resources to assist neighboring devices have a natural scaling property not enjoyed by a cloudlet, which must be provisioned ahead of time. We include in our vision of “new clouds on the block” those that comprise handheld and laptop user devices as well as the increasing number of capable Internet of Things (IoT) devices that are found in homes and industrial settings and will see future application in Smart City civic initiatives. We see these clouds as present in homes; public spaces such as public transportation, libraries and parks; and commercial spaces such as coffee shops. To truly leverage the devices at the edge and introduce them as a significant part in the computing ecosystem, We believe further questions need to be addressed including (1) How to provide a stable interface with these clouds, overcome their dynamic nature, and provide their users with performance guarantees? (2) How to efficiently discover and utilize the available resources in devices without affecting their main user experiences or disrupting their main functionalities? (3) How to provide users with proper incentive to share their resources? (4) How mobile device clouds fit in the cloud computing ecosystem and how can they interact with one another and with data center clouds?