Energy-aware task scheduling: towards enabling mobile computing over MANETs

In this paper, we look into the problem of distributing computational tasks amongst a set of mobile computing devices in a mobile wireless ad hoc network (MANET) in such a way that conserves energy and improves performance. In such a distributed environment, the assignment of computational tasks to different devices and the order of their execution play a vital role in energy conservation and performance improvement. The main contributions of this paper are formulating a novel energy-aware scheduling problem and proposing a heuristic algorithm to solve it. Our scheduling algorithm schedules a set of computational tasks, which may have dependencies and communication, into a set of heterogeneous processors in such a way that minimizes both the total consumed energy and the makespan (i.e., the time by which all tasks complete their execution). Experiments show that significant improvement can be achieved by using our scheduler.