Balanced Scheduling Algorithm Considering Availability in Mobile Grid

The emerging Grid is extending the scope of resources to mobile devices and sensors that are connected through unreliable networks. Nowadays the number of mobile device users is increasing dramatically and the mobile devices provide various capabilities such as location awareness that are not normally incorporated in fixed Grid resources. Nevertheless, mobile devices exhibit inferior characteristics such as poor performance, limited battery life, and unreliable communication, compared to fixed Grid resources. Therefore, the job scheduling and the load balancing are more challenging and sophisticated in mobile Grid environment. This paper presents a novel balanced scheduling algorithm in mobile Grid, taking into account the mobility and availability in scheduling. We analyzed users’ mobility patterns to quantitatively measure the resource availability that is classified into three types: full availability, partial availability, and unavailability. We also propose a load balancing technique by classifying mobile devices into nine groups depending on availability. The experimental results show that our scheduling algorithm provides a superior performance in terms of execution times to one without considering availability and load-balancing.