A System Architecture to Provide Enhanced Grid Access for Mobile Devices

Abstract

More integration and computing power are required to support the proliferation of mobile devices. While new-generation mobile devices improve their absolute capabilities, there is no doubt that creating complicated applications remains a challenging objective because mobile devices are typically resource-constrained, relative to their static counterparts. One possible solution is that mobile devices use Grid services to enable users to access various distributed resources automatically on demand. The combination of mobile and Grid computing has the potential to establish a new field where high performance Grid facilities are accessed through resource-limited mobile devices. A great number of challenges must be solved to realize the vision of building the bridge between Grid services and mobile devices.

This thesis presents the author’s research work that aims to enable users to accomplish complex tasks through their handheld devices by utilizing distributed resources in service-oriented Grid environments. A context-aware framework has been built with Semantic Web technologies to support intelligent interaction between mobile users and Grid services and a semantic matching framework has been implemented to facilitate effective Grid service discovery. Based on the above, a system architecture has been developed to provide enhanced Grid access for mobile devices. The middleware in the system architecture hides the diversity of heterogeneous mobile devices, enables the required Grid services to be discovered in a flexible way, and provides a reliable task execution mechanism. The performance of the system architecture has been evaluated using both comparison and simulation.

Although there is no doubt that there are still a number of challenges that must be overcome before the long-term vision of bringing Grid services into the world of ambient intelligence comes into existence, the system architecture designed, implemented, and evaluated in this thesis represents an important step to realize a variety of new computing models (in particular Grid computing) in the mobile computing world.

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ORCID for David C De Roure: orcid.org/0000-0001-9074-3016

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