Transient clouds: Assignment and collaborative execution of tasks on mobile devices

Abstract

Mobile devices are evolving into powerful systems due to recent advances in their communication, storage and computation technologies. They are poised to play a key role in providing a rich collaborative computing platform for various applications. This paper proposes "Transient Clouds" - a collaborative computing platform that allows nearby devices to form an ad-hoc network and provide various capabilities as cloud services. Transient Clouds utilize the collective capabilities of the devices present, along with their social and context awareness that cannot be provided efficiently by the traditional clouds. We present a modified algorithm of the Hungarian method for assigning tasks to devices in order to achieve various goals (e.g., load balancing, collocating executions, etc.). We evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms through simulation and provide a real implementation on the Android platform using the Wi-Fi Direct framework. We envision Transient Clouds to be utilized in temporal scenarios in which the cloud is created on-the-fly by the devices present in an environment and would disappear as the devices leave the network.