Integrating Mobile Devices into the Grid: Design Considerations and Evaluation

Mobile devices increasingly offer functionality beyond the one provided by tra-ditional resources – processor, memory and applications. This includes, for ex-ample, integrated multimedia equipment, intelligent positioning systems, and different kinds of integrated or accessible sensors. For future generation Grids to be truly ubiquitous we must find ways to compensate for the limitations in-herent in these devices and integrate them into the Grid, in order to leverage available resources and broaden the range of supplied services. The unreliabil-ity and limitations surrounding the mobile resources and services could signifi-cantly degrade the overall Grid availability and performance. In this paper, we propose the utilization of various mobile devices in the form of a single virtual wireless “cluster ” that will hide the heterogeneity and dynamicity, mask the failures and quietly recover from them, provide centralized management and monitoring and allow for the federation of similar services or resources towards advanced functionality, quality of service, and enhanced performance. Finally, we present and analyze the results from the simulative performance evaluation of this design. 1