Towards an Architecture for the Mobile Grid (Architektur für ein Mobiles Grid)

Abstract

Summary Mobility is becoming a central aspect of everyday life and must not be ignored by the ongoing efforts in defining the Next Generation Grid architectures. Currently existing network agnostic Grid middleware solutions are duplicating functionality available from lower layers and cannot benefit from a richer set of additional information available such as the user or device context. In this article we will motivate why an integration of the infrastructure services built for supporting mobile users can be beneficial for the realization of a Next Generation Grid. Starting from a definition of the term Mobile Grid it is shown how new kind of adaptive applications can be realized and how the major obstacles for the wide take up of Grid solutions can be addressed. In particular how grid solutions can benefit from user authentication models, cross-organizational accounting, auditing and billing are covered. Beside the opportunities of this integration several new challenges in particular related to workflows and the management of Service Level Agreements will be outlined. This so called Cross-Layer Cooperation is seen as one of the major differences to other Next Generation Grids based on the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA) [10] approach. In the next section considerations related to deployment of Mobile Grids and why the approach outlined in the OGSA architecture to model grids as the composition of individual services is not adequate for this are presented.