A Risk-Aware Workload scheduler to support secure and efficient collaborative data transfer in mobile communities

Abstract

Limited availability of computing devices and broadband access are among the biggest hurdles in bringing many data rich applications, to the masses in developing countries. Ad-hoc Mobile Collaborative Community (MCC) has been proposed as a solution to address these hurdles. MCC enables two or more persons to aggregate their mobile phone/PDA network channels for collaborative data transfer across the Internet. These channels may be heterogenous and are characterized with frequent Quality of Service (QoS) fluctuations. Further, data to be transferred may contain multiple streams each having distinct, possibly conflicting security and QoS requirements. These factors make scheduling of data over multiple channels, a challenging task. In addition, battery and processing power limitations of mobile nodes imply that scheduler should be energy and processing cost efficient. This paper proposes a novel lightweight scheduler, a Risk-Aware Workload (RAW) scheduler, to support secure and efficient collaborative data transfer in MCC.