Towards an Elastic Application Model for Augmenting Computing Capabilities of Mobile Platforms

We propose a new elastic application model that enables the seamless and transparent use of cloud resources to augment the capability of resource-constrained mobile devices. The salient features of this model include the partition of a single application into multiple components called weblets, and a dynamic adaptation of weblet execution configuration. While a weblet can be platform independent (e.g., Java or .Net bytecode or Python script) or platform dependent (native code), its execution location is transparent – it can be run on a mobile device or migrated to the cloud, i.e., run on one or more nodes offered by an IaaS provider. Thus, an elastic application can augment the capabilities of a mobile device including computation power, storage, and network bandwidth, with the light of dynamic execution configuration according to device’s status including CPU load, memory, battery level, network connection quality, and user preferences. This paper presents the motivations, concepts, typical elasticity patterns, and cost consideration of elastic applications. We validate the augmentation capabilities with an implemented reference architecture and example applications.