Self-Configuration and Administration of Wireless Grids - Cloud, Grid and High Performance Computing: Emerging Applications - page 258

and flexibility. The technologies originally de-
veloped for use in a wired environment are now
being augmented to operate in wireless situations.
The development of the wireless technologies
such as 802.11, GPRS, and 3G has extended the
reach of wireless services to all the individuals.
With the ubiquity and indispensability of wireless
technologies established, these technologies are
now making inroads into grids.
A wireless grid has to face added complexity
due to the limited power of the mobile devices,
the limited bandwidth, and the increased dynamic
nature of the interactions involved. This added
complexity has to be considered while designing
service oriented architecture for mobile devices
(Oliveira et al, 2006). This article highlights the key
characteristics of the wireless grids and suggests
various possible grid layouts. A grid topology and
a naming protocol have been proposed to address
the self-configuration and self-administration
requirements of these grid layouts. This article
is organized as follows. Section 2 describes the
key characteristics of the wireless grids. Section
3 describes various possible grid layouts. Section
4 mentions the technical challenges associated
with these layouts. Section 5 introduces a grid
topology and a naming protocol to address the self
configuration and self administration challenges.
Section 6 concludes the article.

needs to address the issue of connectivity
of mobile devices.
• Limited Computing Resources: Wireless
applications need to share the resources
and to provide access to additional com-
putational resources to mitigate the con-
straints imposed by limited storage, com-
putational capability, and power of mobile
devices.
• Additional New Supporting
Infrastructure Elements: New applica-
tions, especially ones involving dynamic
and unforeseen events, need to be ad-
dressed through the rapid provisioning of
major amounts of computational and com-
munications bandwidths. For example, the
occurrence of an urban catastrophe could
trigger a dynamic adaptive wireless net-
work to alert people to organize remedial
actions in a coordinated fashion, and to
provide better control of available resourc-
es and personnel.

Grid Resources

A Wireless Grid must provide a virtual pool of
computational and communications resources
to consumers at attractive prices. Various grid
resources are described below:

• Computing Power: Wireless devices pos-
sess limited computation power. Wireless
grids can overcome this limitation by dis-
tributing the computational tasks across
multiple power-constrained devices. But
this raises the need for establishing ap-
propriate collaborative processes between
these geographically distributed tasks.
• Storage Capacity: Wireless devices pos-
sess limited storage capability. Grids can
overcome this limitation by distributing the
data storage over multiple devices. Data
can be recombined into a single entity and
then made available to the users. However,

KEY CHARACTERISTICS

The development of the wireless grid technologies
is governed by three driving forces:

• New User Interaction Modalities and
Form Factors : Traditional applications
that can exist on the Wired Grid need to
expand their scope by extending the inter-
actions to mobile devices through adapting
the user interface to small screens, small
keyboards, and other I/O modalities such
as speech. The mobile access interface