Computer Science

Colloquium Details

The Cirrus Cloud Project: Mobile cloud computing in challenged environments

Abstract

Mobile devices are increasingly being relied on for tasks that go beyond simple connectivity and demand more complex processing. In cases where such processing exceeds a device's capability, remote cloud resources can be used to off-load the "heavy lifting" needed by mobile computation tasks. The Cirrus Cloud project focuses on the design and analysis of techniques that enable the provision of cloud computation services to mobile devices. The project is distinguished by 1) its consideration of specific challenges of the wireless and mobile environment and 2) its focus on leveraging the computational capability of a variety of entities present in a mobile device’s environment. In this talk we will first give an overview of the Cirrus Cloud project and its aims. We will then discuss two specific pieces of work that represent two points on a spectrum of mobile cloud computing scenarios. In the first we design and evaluate the COSMOS system which enables mobile computation requirements to map seamlessly to traditional cloud computing services. In the second we develop the Serendipity system which enables mobile devices to offload computation to other devices and entities that they meet. We will conclude with a discussion of our plans for future research.

Biography

Mostafa Ammar is a Regents' Professor with the School of Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He has been with Georgia Tech since 1985. Dr. Ammar received the S.B. and S.M. degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and 1980, respectively and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada in 1985. Dr. Ammar's research interests are in network architectures, protocols and services. He has contributions in the areas of multicast communication and services, multimedia streaming, content distribution networks, network simulation, disruption-tolerant networks, virtual network design, and most recently in mobile cloud computing. He has published extensively in these areas. To date, 30 PhD students have completed their degrees under his supervision; many have gone on to distinguished careers in academia and industry. Dr. Ammar has served the research community in multiple roles. Most notably, he served as the Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking (ToN) from 1999 to 2003, and he was the co-TPC Chair for the IEEE ICNP 1997, ACM CoNEXT 2006 and ACM SIGMETRICS 2007 conferences. He served on the steering committee of ToN from 2005-2012 and currently serves on the steering committee of the ACM CoNEXT conference. His awards include the IBM Faculty Partnership Award (1996), Best Paper Award at the 7th WWW conference (1998), the Georgia Tech Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Advisor Award (2006), the Outstanding Service Award from the IEEE Technical Committee on Computer Communications (2010), and the ACM Mobihoc Best Paper Award (2012). Dr. Ammar was elected Fellow of the IEEE in 2002 and Fellow of the ACM in 2003.