Improving pervasive positioning through three-tier cyber foraging

Cyber foraging is a pervasive computing technique where small, mobile devices offload resource intensive work to stronger, nearby surrogate computers in order to preserve energy and achieve better performance. The problem with relying only on local resources is, that the availability of such resources may be scarce in many environments. In this paper we therefore argue that a third tier should be added when considering cyber foraging; namely cloud computing. By considering the local device, nearby surrogates, and the cloud when scheduling, the mobile device may be able to continue using remote resources even when such resources are not available in its vicinity. An important challenge of pervasive computing is estimating the physical position of mobile devices. As the requirements increase for continuous and accurate positioning so does the computational requirements of positioning—even limiting the possible accuracy in many cases. In this paper we describe how a three tier cyber foraging approach can help improve the positioning capabilities of mobile devices. We demonstrate initial results for how such an approach applies to particle filtering-based GSM positioning.