Tactical Cloudlets

Soldiers in battle or emergency workers responding to a disaster often find themselves in environments with limited computing resources, rapidly-changing mission requirements, high levels of stress, and limited connectivity, which are often referred to as “tactical edge environments.” These types of scenarios make it hard to use mobile software applications that would be of value to soldiers or emergency personnel, including speech and image recognition, natural language processing, and situational awareness, because these computation-intensive tasks take a heavy toll on a mobile device’s battery power and computing resources. Researchers in the Advanced Mobile Systems Initiative at the SEI focus on cyber foraging, which uses discoverable, forward-deployed servers to extend the capabilities of mobile devices by offloading battery-draining computations to these more powerful resources, or for staging data particular to a mission. In this podcast, Grace Lewis discusses five approaches that her team developed and tested for using tactical cloudlets as a strategy for providing infrastructure to support computation offload and data staging at the tactical edge. Listen on Apple Podcasts.