Software Engineering Institute

Soldiers can use handheld mobile computing devices (aka smart-phones) to help with various tasks, such as speech and image recognition, natural language processing, decision making and mission planning. There are challenges to achieving these capabilities such as unreliable networks and bandwidth, lack of computational power, and the toll that computation-intensive tasks take on battery power. In this episode, Grace discusses research that she is leading to overcome these challenges by using cloudlets, which are localized, lightweight servers running one or more virtual machines on which soldiers can offload expensive computations from their handheld mobile devices, thereby providing greater processing capacity and helping conserve battery power.