Portable clouds for provisioning of computing services in networks with very limited connectivity

Abstract In this paper, portable clouds are devised after observing similarities between providing the Internet access to users onboard vehicles and to users in remote resources-constrained communities. In both cases, a gateway connection to the core network is bandwidth-limited and unreliable. Portable clouds are intended to provide applications and services in scenarios even when the gateway link is not available at all for extended periods of time. Portable clouds exploit cache to store contents and provide computing resources locally while the applications are modified to facilitate acceptable QoE. The cache is updated infrequently and only when a fast connection becomes available, or when the contents are physically delivered to the cache using a memory medium