Cloudlet Challenges

The vision about having information at our fingertips anytime and anyplace was only a dream in the mid 1990's. Today, Web access, mobile applications and ubiquitous mail is a reality experienced by millions of users worldwide. The main obstacle for today's mobile devices is the lack of resources, since today's applications are becoming more and resource extensive. This requires increasing the processing power of the device, increasing the memory, a need for greater durability of the battery and so on. All of these tendencies would increase the processing speed of applications and would improve the way they function. Therefore, the need for a more powerful device with a better processing speed becomes inevitable. This is a valid reason for introducing cloudlets, which represent intermediate layers located between the cloud and each mobile device. In this way, instead of accessing a distant cloud, the users connect to the nearest cloudlet through a wireless network. The purpose of this article is to explain the importance of using Cloudlets in our everyday life, by presenting the main challenges and possibilities of further research. We present a short introduction about Cloudlets; the cloudlets architecture and the way they operate. Moreover, we discuss about what their features are, how they work with thin and tick clients, and how they operate as offload elements. In the end, we state the challenges and open research question related to the topic. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.