Self-stabilizing K-out-of-L exclusion cloudlets for mobile devices

Abstract

Cloudlet is a small cloud located near the mobile user, which makes feasible for the mobile devices to interact with clouds and removes the problem of high latency and low bandwidth. Thick clients (e.g., mobile users with heavy needs) are totally dependent on the cloudlet to satisfy their heterogeneous requests. K-out-of-l exclusion is a variant of classic mutual exclusion in distributed computing systems. It is used to deal with heterogeneous requests. In K-out-of-l exclusion, a process can request at most K resources out of l available resources. A cloudlet with richer resources or located near the actual cloud can also act as a cloud for other cloudlets. In this exposition, we present a K-out-of-l exclusion cloudlet for a mobile user. Recently, Datta et al. had proposed a self-stabilizing K-out-of-l exclusion protocol for tree networked static distributed systems [5]. We reduce the waiting time of Datta's protocol. We then adapt the modified protocol for cellular mobile networks and apply it to resolve the latency problem in cloudlets.