Peer-to-peer resource discovery in mobile Grids

Grids are likely to be the mainstay of distributed computing. Grid was firstly applied as a concept for sharing computing resources among wired nodes, but there has been a growing interest in extending this concept to mobile environments. Although significant work has been done towards mobile grids, much of it has followed centralized approaches based on infrastructure wireless networks. We believe that a less restrictive, decentralized approach that supports mobile collaboration in ad-hoc wireless networks can cater for novel grid applications. To address this issue, we propose a middleware architecture called MoGrid. MoGrid orchestrates the distribution of grid tasks among mobile devices in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion. In this paper, we focus on the P2P Discovery Protocol (P2PDP), which is a central element of our architecture. P2PDP aids in distributing tasks among the most resourceful devices, while mitigating the overhead of control messages exchanged among them. We describe a prototype implementation of our architecture and discuss some issues related to the adoption of P2PDP as an ad-hoc resource discovery mechanism in mobile grids.