Abstract
Mobile cloud computing in the context of ad-hoc clouds brings new challenges when offloading computation from mobile devices. The management of application deployment needs to ensure that the offloading provides users with the expected benefits, but it suddenly needs to cope with a highly dynamic environment which lacks a central authority and in which computational nodes appear and disappear.
We propose an approach to the management of ad-hoc systems in such dynamic environment using component ensembles that connect mobile devices with more powerful computation nodes. Our approach aims to address the challenges of scalability and robustness of such systems without the need for central authority, relying instead on simple patterns that lead to reasonable adaptation decisions based on limited and imprecise information.