Static allocation of resources to communicating subtasks in a heterogeneous ad hoc grid environment

An ad hoc grid is a heterogeneous computing and communication system that allows a group of mobile devices to accomplish a mission, often in a hostile environment. Energy management is a major concern in ad hoc grids. The problem studied here focuses on statically assigning resources in an ad hoc grid to an application composed of communicating subtasks. The goal of the allocation is to minimize the average percentage of energy consumed by the application to execute across the machines in the ad hoc grid, while meeting an application execution time constraint. This pre-computed allocation is then used when the application is deployed in a mission. Six different heuristic approaches of varying time complexities have been designed and compared via simulations to solve this ad hoc grid allocation problem. Also, a lower bound based on the performance metric has been designed to compare the performance of the heuristics developed. © 2005 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.