Resource Allocation and Provisioning in Computational Mobile Grid

1. Introduction

Grid computing is an emerging computational and networking infrastructure. The term grid computing was used in early 1990’s by I. Foster and C. Kesselman in the book, “The Grid: A blueprint of new infrastructure” (2004). As per their statement “Grid computing is a large scale geographically distributed hardware and software infrastructure which is composed of heterogeneous type of network resources owned and shared by multiple administrative domain which coordinate to provide transparent, dependable, pervasive and consistent computing support. These applications can perform either distributed computing, high throughput computing, on demand computing, data intensive computing, collaborative computing or multimedia computing” (Foster et al., 2001). Computational mobile grid is an aggregation of mobile computational devices, a huge chunk of computational resources to execute a job in a crystal clear way for the user situated anywhere in the mobile grid network. Computational mobile grid is elaborated on in the section 1.1.

1.1. Computational Mobile Grid

In recent years, we have seen drastic increase in number of mobile devices. These mobile devices are becoming popular not only by their communication flexibility but also for their computational capability. It is fair to have included these mobile devices to the grid to harness the computing power of these devices and the services of the stationary grid. To achieve this, an interface is created between mobile devices and stationary grid. A collection of mobile devices together form a grid. Thus a computational mobile grid consists of mobile grids and/or some stationary grid (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Computation mobile grid

Modern mobile devices (Minar et al., 1998) are sophisticated, versatile and equipped with good processing capability. These qualities make them compute capable. VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) design has helped to add number of functionality in lesser size of mobile devices.