Mobile Ad Hoc Computational Grid: Opportunities and Challenges

Computational Grids and Clusters have been extensively deployed and widely used to solve complex and challenging problems in science and engineering areas. These systems consist of powerful computing nodes connected through high-performance communication networks. Due to recent advances in mobile computing and communication technologies, it has become feasible to use mobile nodes as a contributing entity to Grid. Recently several approaches have been proposed to integrate mobile nodes with Grid computing systems, but in these approaches mobile nodes are mostly used as terminals either to submit jobs or access services. The approaches in which mobile nodes can share computing resources are restricted to infrastructure-based communication systems such as cellular network, and therefore cannot be used in mobile ad hoc environments. In this paper we propose a distributed computing infrastructure named mobile ad hoc computational Grid which allows mobile nodes to share computing resources in mobile ad hoc environment. Compared to traditional parallel and distributed computing systems such as Grid and Cluster mobile ad hoc computational Grid is characterized by shared and unreliable communication medium, low bandwidth, high latency, node mobility, and infrastructure-less network environment, so it introduces numerous opportunities as well as challenges. This paper describes the applications and architecture of mobile ad hoc computational Grid, and discusses the potential research issues and future research directions.