Towards Autonomic Provisioning of Wireless Grid Services

The wireless grid paradigm has been proposed recently to support seamless collaborations among devices. Realizing the promise of the wireless grid involves providing a set of middleware services that would allow devices to autonomously share their resources. However, existing wireless grid middleware provide only rudimentary support in this regard. This paper describes our initial experiences in realizing autonomic resource management capabilities for wireless grids. Specifically, we present protocols that support self-configuration mechanisms such as resource discovery and brokering. The proposed protocols leverage similar techniques in the wired grid domain while adding new functionality to handle the dynamic nature of wireless grids. We demonstrate the protocols by using them to build a grid of Bluetooth devices. We also used Bluetooth grid to compare the performance of our service discovery protocol with other similar protocols. Results indicate that our discovery protocol strikes a balance between the compared protocols in terms of resource discovery time and expressiveness of resource description. This allows the protocol to support sophisticated resource brokering and scheduling techniques without incurring prohibitive overheads. Furthermore, in contrast to the existing protocols our protocol supports service advertisements. This facilitates more efficient handling of dynamic situations such as devices leaving and joining the grid.