Ibis for mobility: solving challenges of mobile computing using grid techniques

Mobility is an increasingly important part of today's computing landscape. There is currently an incredible growth in the deployment of "SmartPhone" devices, mobile computers with a variety of networking and sensor technologies. In addition, the growth of wireless networks such as WiFi have untethered users from the wall bringing mobility to traditional laptop computers. The challenges that the mobility of these devices create for networked computing are analogous to many of the problems faced in the area of Grid Computing. In this paper we outline parallel challenges in these two areas and argue that solutions to the problems in the Grid Computing space are applicable to the problems faced by these new platforms. We demonstrate how the Ibis platform, developed to address challenges in the area of Grid Computing, is ideally suited for building distributed applications for mobile devices and detail our work to bring Ibis to the Android Smartphone platform. We demonstrate that the use of this system gives mobile devices the computing power of the Grid, integrating the two areas and solving issues with limited compute power on mobile devices. We also explain how Ibis provides a unique API for building distributed applications on mobile devices enabling truly distributed computing on this new platform.