Scheduling and Load Sharing in Mobile Computing Using Tickets

Load sharing in mobile computing environments is challenged by frequent network disconnections, widely varying bandwidths among wired and wireless links, limited computing power of Mobile Hosts (MHs) and transient servers due to frequent hand-off. We consider a three-layered network architecture consisting of Mobile Hosts (MHs), Mobile Support Stations (MSSs) and Supervisory Hosts (SHs). We outline the design of tickets, which combines the features of a credit card and workload information submitted to a server. Clients submit their database and computation-intensive applications to a MSS using tickets. This paper proposes a broader use of tickets, than in earlier works, in scheduling, load sharing and billing in mobile computing environments. A ticket contains valuable information to route the results of computation through the network, to schedule and load balance jobs in the network using priority and historical run-time information of jobs executed at the MSS. We outline a load sharing and scheduling algorithm to be executed at an MSS upon receiving a job with a ticket from the client. Job transfer rather than migrating server objects has been used since it avoids the contextswitching overhead on the secondary host.