The case for cyber foraging

TLDR

Cyber foraging uses opportunistically discovered servers in the environment to improve the performance of interactive applications and distributed file systems on mobile clients. The paper proposes cyber foraging to augment mobile devices’ computational and storage capabilities and introduces VERSUDS, a virtual interface for discovering heterogeneous service discovery protocols. Cyber foraging is a mechanism that augments mobile devices’ computational and storage capabilities by leveraging opportunistically discovered servers, and VERSUDS provides a virtual interface to heterogeneous service discovery protocols. The authors demonstrate that staging data at untrusted servers improves distributed file system performance, and that remote execution enhances interactive application performance.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose cyber foraging: a mechanism to augment the computational and storage capabilities of mobile devices. Cyber foraging uses opportunistically discovered servers in the environment to improve the performance of interactive applications and distributed file systems on mobile clients. We show how the performance of distributed file systems can be improved by staging data at these servers even though the servers are not trusted. We also show how the performance of interactive applications can be improved via remote execution. Finally, we present VERSUDS: a virtual interface to heteregeneous service discovery protocols that can be used to discover these servers.