An access point to device association technique for optimized data transfer in mobile grids

In a mobile grid computing framework where mobile devices are used as computing resources, minimizing the task offloading time remains an important issue. A task is an independent unit of execution consisting of a input data volume for execution and optionally a target-specific executable. We consider a mobile grid infrastructure where mobile devices are connected via Wi-Fi network and the grid infrastructure has a set of tasks (i.e. a set of data volumes) to be transferred to a subset of the mobile devices. In a Wi-Fi network, mobile devices usually associate themselves to the access points (APs) having the strongest radio signal. In this paper, we address the problem of AP activation (by frequency assignment) and association of AP with devices in the context of minimizing the overall data-transfer completion time. We present a constraint based formulation and also a heuristic as solutions. Simulations results are presented which contrast our proposed methods with some of the earlier works.