Modeling a Computational Grid of Mobile Devices as a Multi-Agent System

Mobile wireless devices have won strong support from users and serve as a basis for today’s anytime, anywhere computing paradigm. These devices, however, are significantly constrained by wireless communication media and mobility; they also lack the computational resources to resolve resource-intensive tasks. Grid computing paradigm can be used to overcome these constraints by pooling the resources of several willing and cooperative mobile devices to resolve a computationally-intensive task. We propose an architecture for the computational grid based on a multi-agent system paradigm in a cellular network. Intelligent agents use each other’s resources in order to solve a shared computational task. In this paper, we discuss several aspects of the architecture including agent activities, mobility issues, network configuration, parallel task distribution, assignment and resolution, and agent communication protocols. We conclude with implementation details of this multi-agent system and discussion of the planned experiments. 1