August 11, 2015—For several years, SEI researchers on the Pervasive Mobile Computing team have investigated the use of cloud computing at the tactical edge—the environment at the edge of a network infrastructure that is resource constrained, intermittent, and in which users are subject to high levels of stress. This research is based on the concept of cyber foraging, in which the capabilities of resource-limited mobile devices are augmented by available computing resources in the surrounding environment. The research also drove the development of the tactical cloudlets. Hosted on vehicles or other platforms in proximity of mobile users, tactical cloudlets can

• provide infrastructure to offload expensive computation
  
• provide forward data staging for a mission
• perform data filtering to remove unnecessary data from streams intended for dismounted users
  
• serve as collection points for data heading for enterprise repositories
  

“KD-Cloudlet can now be used by anyone developing a mobile application that contains computation-intensive code, collects large amounts of data in the field, or uses large amounts of data in the cloud,” said the SEI’s Grace Lewis, deputy lead for the Pervasive Mobile Systems team. “The usage domains that benefit the most from cyber-foraging are resource-constrained environments, such as those experienced by military personnel, first responders, field researchers, or anyone who works disconnected from the enterprise, such as medics, support personnel, or salespeople,” said Lewis. 

The KD-Cloudlet package contains code for implementing a full cyber-foraging system, including cloudlet client and server, as well as a simple example application for speech recognition. 

Interested developers can download the code from the SEI GitHub repository: https://github.com/SEI-AMS/pycloud/wiki. 

For more information about tactical cloudlets, please visit http://sei.cmu.edu/mobilecomputing/research/tactical-cloudlets/.

For more information about the SEI’s Pervasive Mobile Systems team, please visit http://www.sei.cmu.edu/mobilecomputing/.