Aegis: Reliable Application Execution over the Mobile Cloud

With the advent of IoT and the associated variety of pervasive and context-aware applications, there is an increasing requirement to support the execution of these applications on devices with limited processing power. This is a cost-intensive process as this usually requires the deployment of centralized computing infrastructure accessible via a cloud interface. We envision a distributed execution environment comprised of diverse computing resources as an alternative solution to this problem. This execution environment can be defined as a mobile cloud. However, the inherent unreliability of the mobile cloud requires developers to add reliability within the applications separately making the development process tedious. In this position paper, we present Aegis - a framework that provides a reliable and unified computing platform with built-in failure detection and repair mechanisms. Aegis draws upon the actor based execution model as well as stream processing applications to provide a reliable overlay over unreliable environments. Aegis also relives developers of the task of adding reliability mechanisms to applications separately.