Exporting processing power of home embedded devices to global computing applications

Abstract

In today's life we are surrounded by numerous embedded devices that serve our daily needs, without being continuously in use. This fact, in conjunction with the tremendous growth of these devices, results in considerable idle time in a home environment. In other words, we are in the middle of a significant amount of underutilized processing power. In this paper we investigate the idea of exploiting the unused embedded processing power to execute intensive Global Computing applications, and the hardware and software issues that arise from such an approach. We present a framework enabling the participation of home embedded devices to the Global Computing grid, which we call e-Grid (embedded grid), along with a theoretical analysis of its performance gain. We also develop an experimental setup based on Jini technology, and measure its actual performance, trying to explore the feasibility of the e-Grid approach.

A Wireless Networked Appliances Interoperability Architecture

“…Its novelty compared to the existing research in the field [22][23][24] is in the ability to expose the devices resources and provide them independently for simultaneous use within an implicitly composed function. The design of the framework was inspired by NASIF where the dynamic services composition mechanism has enabled us to realise the need for such configuration of the appliances capabilities.…”