S-CMA: Sporadic cloud-based mobile augmentation supported by an ad-hoc cluster of moving handheld devices and a virtualization layer

© 2015 IEEE. Cloud-based Mobile Augmentation (CMA) is aimed to increase the computing capabilities of handheld devices for enabling the execution of resource-intensive mobile applications. In order to avoid latencies and excessive bandwidth consumption, the most recent CMA approaches borrow the augmentation resources from proximate clusters of handheld devices which do remain immobile, being their mobility an open challenge in literature. This paper proposes a new CMA solution where the resources are lent by an ad-hoc cluster of moving handheld devices. The complexity derived from the cluster mobility is tackled by a virtualization layer which handles stationary virtual nodes that are emulated by the users' mobile devices. This way our CMA approach takes on sharing and allocating the resources available in the mobile ad-hoc cluster, ignoring the mobility of its devices. This contributes to alleviate limitations of existing CMA solutions that degrade significantly the experience of mobile users.