Abstract

Abstract. Smartphones become more and more popular over recent years due to their small form factors. However, such mobile systems are resource-constrained in view of computational power, storage and battery life. Offloading resource-intensive tasks (aka mobile cloud com-puting) to distant (e.g., cloud computing) or closely located data centers (e.g., cloudlet) overcomes these issues. Especially, cloudlets provide com-putational power with low latency for responsive applications due to their proximity to mobile users. However, a large-scale deployment of range-restricted cloudlets is still an open challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel concept for a large-scale deployment of cloudlets by upgrading wireless home routers. Beside router’s native purpose of routing data packets through the network, it can now offer computing resources with low latency and high bandwidth without additional hardware. Proving our concept, we conducted comprehensive benchmark tests against ex-isting concepts. As result, the feasibility of this concept is shown and provide a promising way to large-scale deploy cloudlets in existing in-frastructures. Key words: wireless home router, mobile cloud computing, cloudlet, smartphones, offloading, edge computing 1