An empirical evaluation of a simple energy aware scheduler for mobile grids

Abstract

Nowadays mobile devices are multi-core computers with considerable unused capabilities. Therefore, several researchers have considered harnessing the power of these battery-powered devices for distributed computing. Although their evergrowing capabilities, the fact that mobile devices run on battery poses a major challenge for applying traditional distributed computing techniques. Particularly, researchers aimed at using mobile devices as resources for executing computationally intensive task. Different job scheduling algorithms were proposed with this aim, but many of them require information that is unavailable or difficult to obtain in real-life environments, such as how much energy would require a job to be finished. In this context, Simple Energy Aware Scheduler (SEAS) is a scheduling technique for computational intensive Mobile Grids that only require easily accessible information. It was proposed in 2010 and it has been the base for a range of research work. Despite being described as easily implementable in real-life scenarios, SEAS and other SEAS-improvements works have always been evaluated using simulations. In this work, we present a distributed computing platform for mobile devices that support SEAS and empirical evaluation of the SEAS scheduler. The obtained result supports previous simulation results and by extension further validating other SEAS-based results.