Supporting smooth movement of mobile clients is important when offloading services on an edge computing platform. Interruption free client mobility demands seamless migration of the offloading service to nearby edge servers. However, fast migration of offloading services across edge servers in a WAN environment poses significant challenges to the handoff service design. In this paper, we present a novel service handoff system which seamlessly migrates offloading services to the nearest edge server, while the mobile client is moving. Service handoff is achieved via container migration. We identify an important performance problem during Docker container migration. Based on our systematic study of container layer management and image stacking, we propose a migration method which leverages the layered storage system to reduce file system synchronization overhead, without dependence on the distributed file system. We implement a prototype system and conduct experiments using real world product applications. Evaluation results reveal that compared to state-of-the-art service handoff systems designed for edge computing platforms, our system reduces the total duration of service handoff time by 80% (56%) with network bandwidth 5Mbps (20Mbps).
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Effects of Environmental Noise Levels on Patient Handoff Communication in a Mixed Reality Simulation
When medical caregivers transfer patients to another person’s care (a patient handoff), it is essential they effectively communicate the patient’s condition to ensure the best possible health outcomes. Emergency situations caused by mass casualty events (e.g., natural disasters) introduce additional difficulties to handoff procedures such as environmental noise. We created a projected mixed reality simulation of a handoff scenario involving a medical evacuation by air and tested how low, medium, and high levels of helicopter noise affected participants’ handoff experience, handoff performance, and behaviors. Through a human-subjects experimental design study (N = 21), we found that the addition of noise increased participants’ subjective stress and task load, decreased their self-assessed and actual performance, and caused participants to speak louder. Participants also stood closer to the virtual human sending the handoff information when listening to the handoff than they stood to the receiver when relaying the handoff information. We discuss implications for the design of handoff training simulations and avenues for future handoff communication research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1800961
- PAR ID:
- 10442469
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 28th ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 10
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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