The scarcity and diversity of resources among the devices of heterogeneous computing
environments may affect their ability to perform services with specific Quality
of Service constraints, particularly in dynamic distributed environments where the
characteristics of the computational load cannot always be predicted in advance.
Our work addresses this problem by allowing resource constrained devices to cooperate
with more powerful neighbour nodes, opportunistically taking advantage
of global distributed resources and processing power. Rather than assuming that
the dynamic configuration of this cooperative service executes until it computes
its optimal output, the paper proposes an anytime approach that has the ability
to tradeoff deliberation time for the quality of the solution. Extensive simulations
demonstrate that the proposed anytime algorithms are able to quickly find a good
initial solution and effectively optimise the rate at which the quality of the current
solution improves at each iteration, with an overhead that can be considered
negligible