Monitoring and status representation of devices in wireless grids

Abstract

Grid Computing is a concept, a network, a work in progress, part hype and part reality, and it is increasingly capturing the attention of the computing community. The advancements in wireless technologies and increased number of wireless device users supported the evolution of wireless grids. Grid information server (GIS) has to maintain the most up-to-date resource status information of all devices, so that, application can be scheduled to devices that meet its resource requirements. Each wireless device is resource constrained, and its resource status keeps on varying dynamically depending upon number of applications it is executing, amount of data it is communicating, battery level, and mobility. In order to keep up-to-date resource status, a continuous monitoring is needed. The increase in number of status delivery of such monitored observations will consume lot much of bandwidth, making the database size of grid information server to grow continuously over a period of time. To solve this problem, we consider moderate number of communications of status updates that balances both bandwidth consumption and resource status accuracy. Also, we propose three methods to represent these update messages so that bandwidth requirement and latency of communication with GIS is reduced. Normal representation, Variable bit length representation, and Relative difference representation methods are proposed and analyzed. Relative difference method is analyzed in best case as well as in worst case, and is found to be more efficient compared to other two methods in terms of memory requirements. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.