Mid Semester Seminar

Computational Mobile Grid: A

Computing Infrastructure on
Mobile Devices

Submitted By: Under Supervision

of:
Dinesh Prasad Sahu DR.
D.P.Vidyarthi
M.Tech. 3rd Sem.
1. Introduction
The last decade has been seen a substantial increase in mobile devices as the result of faster
hardware and sophisticated softwares. These mobile devices are used for communication (voice,
text or picture communication) and for solving resource intensive computational problems
(Laptop, PDAs etc).These devices are cost effective, minimal in size, high speed and give better
performance. Due to these properties they are getting popular, emerging very fast and rapidly
growing in numbers.
For the better resource utilization and doing a complex computational work in optimal time
various type of computing methodology have been proposed in the literature .
Grid Computing
The term grid computing originated in the early 1990s for making computer power as easy to
access as an electric power grid in Ian Foster's and Carl Kesselman's seminal work, "The Grid:
Blueprint for a new computing infrastructure”. Grid computing is a term referring to the
combination of computer resources from multiple administrative domains to reach common goal
in a transparent manner. Grids are loosely coupled, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed.
Although a grid can be dedicated to a specialized application, it is more common that a single
grid will be used for a variety of different purposes. Grids are often constructed with general-
purpose grid software libraries known as middleware. The grid is supported by the advanced
network technologies for the effective utilization and availability of the resources. Resource
sharing is one of the prime objectives of the grid. Grid computing deals with the aggregation of
the computing power available anywhere in the grid. Inter Process Communication for the
processes, allocated on different computing nodes, are supported and managed by the high-speed
network.
Dynamic Grid Formation
In recent years mobile devices has been increasing drastically together with their increased
computing flexibility. These mobile devices can also be incorporated with the grid to avail the
computing services of the stationary grid. To serve this purpose an interface between the mobile
devices and stationary grid services has to be created. Therefore a computational mobile grid is a
collection of mobile devices together with stationary grids. Modern mobile devices are
sophisticated , versatile and efficient in nature so more functionality have been added to make
them more compute intense. Numbers of functionality in lesser size mobile devices are possible
because of the VLSI technology. In computational mobile grid some of the devices are always
 busy in doing computations and some of them are not active. The goal of the computational
mobile grid is to identify those underutilized devices and use them efficiently to enhance the
performance. Sometimes the all the mobile devices are heavily used and can not be able to satisfy
the further computational request ,in this situation the load can be transferred to the stationary
grid.
Mobile grid Mobile grid Mobile grid

Mobile node

Stationary node

Base station
Stationary grid

Stationary node

2. Issues in computational mobile grid formation

Various numbers of issues are associated with the dynamic grid formation that has to be handled and
controlled in optimized way. These issues are described below.

2.1 Mobility

The computational mobile devices can move from one location to another at anytime. Therefore the
network topology of such type of network is always changing, it is dynamic in nature. Meta scheduler
which is part of the grid middleware and schedules the job has to take great care of the movement of the
mobile devices. Connection of these mobile devices becomes important when they are sharing some
computations. Routing decision of a routing algorithm is to be taken dynamically where a mobile device
can also work as a router.

Two solutions are suggested in literature for handling the Mobility of nodes in mobile grid

1. Mobile IP

2. Cellular IP

1. Mobile IP is an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standard communications protocol that is
designed to allow mobile device users to move from one network to another while maintaining a
permanent IP address. It provides good solution of the mobility problem at macro level. The Mobile IP
protocol allows location-independent routing of IP datagram’s on the Internet Mobile IP provides an
efficient, scalable mechanism for roaming within the Internet. Using Mobile IP, nodes may change their
point-of-attachment to the Internet without changing their home IP address. it consists of three
components mobile host ,home agent and foreign agent. A home agent stores information about mobile
nodes whose permanent home address is in the home agent's network. A foreign agent stores information
about mobile nodes visiting its network. Foreign agents also advertise care-of addresses, which are used
by Mobile IP. A mobile node can have to address home address and foreign address.

Operations in mobile IP

Discovery: A Mobile Node discovers its Foreign and Home Agents during agent discovery. During the
agent discovery phase, the Home Agent and Foreign Agent advertise their services on the network by
using the ICMP message. The Mobile Node listens to these advertisements to determine if it is connected
to its home network or foreign network. It compares the network part of its IP address with the network
part of the IP address of the node from which it has received the packet if both are different a Mobile
Node determines that it is connected to a foreign network, it acquires a care-of address. If both are same
then it discovers that it is in home network. Two types of care-of addresses exist:

• Care-of address acquired from a Foreign Agent

• Collocated care-of address

A Foreign Agent care-of address is an IP address of a Foreign Agent that has an interface on the foreign
network being visited by a Mobile Node. A Mobile Node that acquires this type of care-of address can
share the address with other Mobile Nodes. A collocated care-of address is an IP address temporarily
assigned to the interface of the Mobile Node itself. A collocated care-of address represents the current
position of the Mobile Node on the foreign network and can be used by only one Mobile Node at a time.
When the Mobile Node hears a Foreign Agent advertisement and detects that it has moved outside of its
home network, it begins registration.

Registration: registration procedure consists of the following steps

1. The mobile nodes sends registration request to foreign agent.

2. The foreign agent conveys this request to home agent.
3. The home agent can either accept or reject the request and it reply to foreign agent.
4. The foreign agent conveys this reply to mobile host.

Sometimes the foreign agent is busy and mobile host directly register its care of address to home agent.
This care of address is called co-located care of address.
 MN
MN HA
FA HM

MN-Mobile Node
RR RR
RR FA-Foreign Agent

HM-Home Agent

RR-Registration Request/reply RR
RR
t
t
RR

Tunneling: Instead of forwarding these packets to a destination that is physically in the same network as
the home agent, the home agent redirects these packets towards the foreign agent through an tunnel by
encapsulating the datagram with a new IP header using the care of address of the mobile node.

2. Cellular IP: A mobile node can move within the network at micro level of mobility. Micro level of
mobility is supported by cellular IP, it can interworks with the mobile ip to provide wide area mobilityit
has three component mobile node base station and gateway.

Base station: A base station is the wireless access point .when the mobile host move from one to another
network, its base stations’ responsibility to provide services Gateway: mobile hosts are connected by the
internet via gateway and they can communicate with each other in the presence of gateway.

Mobile host: An entity that is able to move from one cell to another under the control of a base station.

Routing in Cellular IP: The route through the gateway sends its beacon is recorded by the base stations
and is used to route new packet through this route for that mobile host. The route will be valid till
routetimeout.sometimes the hosts maintains the route mapping that it has used and sends the route update
packet to refresh the route cache.

2.2 Resource management and scheduling: Computational mobile grid is dynamic in nature and highly
heterogeneous; the role of the resource manager (Meta scheduler) becomes very important in this
scenario. The works of the resource manager are listed below

 Information gathering about the mobile devices and their resources in the grid is very important.
As the mobile devices are mobile in nature and can roam from one network to another network,
their information about their location becomes very pivotal in computation for the Meta
Scheduler. A mobile node can be sometimes sharing the load so how many resources are
 available and how many are in use is to known by the resource manager for their effective
management.
 Maintaining an updated list of the device’s availability is also equally important. Some of the
mobile devices are shut down when their battery power finishes. So list should be time dependent
because a node is on at a time can be off at another time due to some technical reason or resource
constraint.
 Maintaining an updated list of the device’s functionality plays an important role in load sharing or
assigning the new computation to the functioning node. If a node is functioning then only it is
possible to include it for resource intensive computation.
 The mobile grid is dynamic and heterogeneous in nature so allocation of the resources in wise
manner to mobile devices is need to be done.
 The role of the Meta Scheduler in Job scheduling on mobile devices becomes very crucial in
mobile grid environment.Meta Scheduler works above the local scheduler. We have a local
scheduler that manages and control the scheduling activities in each and every node on the mobile
grid as well as in stationary grid. Above the local scheduler we have a global scheduler that is
known as the Meta Scheduler which is responsible to schedules the job in effective manner to
reach a common goal
 A device can fail to work or it can be disconnected due to some feasible reasons those devices
should be take care by the Meta scheduler and when ever it becomes ready to integrate in the
system, it should be integrated smoothly.
 Sometimes a device stops functioning at that situation the job assign to that device should be
transfer to the node that is available and functioning; this is known as Job Migration.
Sometimes a node is overloaded in that case load has to share among the number of nodes, this
is called Load Sharing.

2.3 Security

Security is in important issue in the computational mobile grid. Lots of security algorithms exists and are
deployed in grid .Every security algorithm has a level and a level is associated with some cost; higher the
level of security algorithm, higher will be the cost and vice versa. Common security issues for a grid are
listed as below.
• Confidentiality: Various encryption algorithms ensure the confidentiality of data being passed. There
are many secret key and public key cryptography algorithms available to do so. The term privacy
and confidentiality are used interchangeably.
• Integrity: Integrity of data means the data received by recipient after the communication has not been
corrupted by the external interferences. it is very important to ensure the integrity of the message
(data). Message digest can also used to ensure integrity.
• Authentication and Authorization: Authentication is a process of identifying who you are for an
operation and request. And Authorization gives what you are allowed to do. The user is first
authenticated then an authorization list is given to him/her. Authentication can be done by digital
signature and digital certificate. Certification mechanism binds an encryption key along with
authenticated identity. Certification authority is the third party that validates this binding.
• Single Sign-on: the user jobs can move from one node to the other node in various domains and
networks. A single-sign on is expected from the system so that user need not to login on various
machines for the job execution
• Delegation: Delegation deals with the property in which the delegations of the security rights are made
to various servers. This is authentication forwarding to the nodes, servers resources etc. on behalf of
the user. The best mechanism for delegation is to generate a special message and specify to whom
you are delegating the rights and for how long. Once the duration expires the message no longer
grants the permission
• Firewall traversal: Firewall is a filter for accepting or discarding the packets based on the
characteristics. All messages entering or leaving the intranet pass through the firewall, which checks
each message and prevent those that do not meet the specified security criteria.
2.4 BATTERY CONSTRAINT

In real life Battery power is a major problem. The mobile nodes in computational mobile grid have some
battery power. They receive and forward the incoming packets. Whenever they do so, their battery power
decreases accordingly. Once the battery power reaches to zero the mobile node shut down and get
disconnected from the grid. Nowadays the mobile devices have lot of battery power together with
computational capacity. More computational capacity of a mobile device requires more battery power and
less computation requires comparatively less power. Thus the computational capacity is directly
proportional to the battery power. There exists a tradeoff between the computation and the battery power.
So the requirement of a software system that uses the battery power in optimized way to perform
maximum computation in minimum battery power is important in modern days. A mobile device of a
computational mobile grid requires more battery power to sustain itself. We can use the principle of the
“do the right thing” in the software should be adopted to save the battery power. (Clarke, Humphrey,
2002).
"Reflective middleware” is a term that refers to the collection of technologies that dynamically manage
and control hardware and software resources based on the experience. It has the ability to dynamically
query, update and adjust according to the resources constraints. The users of the mobile grid can put a
threshold on the computational power requirement. If the computational power required by an application
is within the threshold it will involve in that computation and if the need of computational power is above
the threshold it will deny that. Thus doing the computation according to its available battery power is a
way to keep the node alive as longer as possible in mobile grid.

FUTURE RESEARCH SCOPES

The list of research scopes is as follows.
• The channel allocation problem of such infrastructure
• The Cellular IP management
• Dynamic routing
• Information gathering and maintenance about the mobile devices
• Resource management
• Job scheduling on mobile devices (Meta-scheduler)
• Job migration for fault tolerance and load balancing
• Security
• Energy constraint routines of the middleware
References

 Talukder A.K.(2005).Mobile computing technology, applications and service creation,

Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing Company Limited.

 Ghosh sE.K.(2005).”Mobile Computing “Department of C S E,CSE-

100,April,www.cse.iitk.ac.in/users/rkg/talks/mobile_main.pdf

 Perkins C.,Editor,NewyorkWorking Group.(1996).Request for comments:RFC2002,”IP

Mobility Support”, October 1996,http:/www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2002.txt

 http://www.cisco.com
 http://www.cse.wustl.edu