Providing local cloud services to mobile devices with inter-cloudlet communication

The importance of mobility has influenced the emergence of several mobile computing frameworks, one of which is cloud computing. In this paper, we propose a design for a system that allows mobile users to access discoverable cloudlet servers which can provide them with services and resources on demand. The system involves a cloudlet root server that acts as a directory with which cloudlets register their presence and offered resources, and to which users may direct their requests for mobile services. Cloudlets communicate in order to service the user's requests, by either delegating these requests or by breaking requests into tasks and working on them cooperatively. We provide an experimental evaluation for measuring the delay of user requests and the load on the cloudlets under different scenarios. The results are promising.