Mobility-Aware Grid Computing

Abstract

Grid computing has emerged as a paradigm for coordinated resource sharing and problem solving in dynamic, multiinstitutional virtual organizations (Foster, 2001). A grid computing system is essentially a large-scale distributed system designed to aggregate resources from multiple sites, giving to users the opportunity to take advantage of enormous computational, storage, or bandwidth resources that would otherwise be impossible to attain. Current applications of grid computing focus on computational-expensive processing of large volumes of scientific data, for example, for earthquake simulation, signal processing, cancer research, and pattern search in DNA sequences. At the same time, the recent advances in mobile and wireless communications have resulted in the availability of an enormous number of mobile computing devices such as laptop PCs and PDAs (personal digital assistants). Thus, it is natural to extend the idea of resource sharing to mobile and wireless computing environments. Resource-sharing collaboration between mobile users appears as a promising research direction toward the alleviation of the inherent resource constraints present in mobile computing environments. Either in the context of mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) or in wireless networks based on fixed infrastructure (i.e., cellular networks, wireless local area networks (WLANs), small- or large-scale communities of mobile users can form mobile grid systems and collaborate in order to either achieve a common goal (otherwise impossible to achieve) or simply overcome their individual limitations. In the following, we highlight the fundamental issues toward the realization of a computational mobile grid system.