Extending volunteer computing through mobile ad hoc networking

Abstract

Volunteer computing provides a practical and low cost solution to the increasing computational demands of many applications. Recent advancements in mobile device processing capabilities, combined with the energy efficiency of the mobile devices, make their inclusion in a distributed computing architecture particularly appealing. However, the intrinsic requirement of Internet connectivity to participate in volunteer computing limits the direct adoption of mobile devices due to service availability or related costs to connect to the Internet. In this paper, we propose and implement a novel computational architecture that extends the ability of mobile devices to participate in volunteer computing through ad hoc networking. By introducing decentralized task distribution points, mobile devices are invited to join the computation via device to device communication, removing the requirement for an Internet connection. Using a prototype implementation running on Android devices, we investigate the impact of a promising ad hoc communication technology, namely WiFi Direct, and two task distribution algorithms with different computation and communication overheads, under various scenarios. Experimental results show that our proposed approach is feasible with only minor additional energy consumption at the decentralized task distribution points.