Assignment and collaborative execution of tasks on transient clouds

Transient clouds (TC) are temporal clouds that enable nearby mobile devices to form an ad hoc network and advertise their capabilities as cloud services. Through utilizing the collective power of the group, devices are no longer constrained by their local hardware and software capabilities. TC harness the ubiquitous nature of mobile devices along with their ever-increasing sets of capabilities in providing a rich computing platform. In this paper, we present two instantiations of task assignment algorithms that achieve various goals such as balancing the load on devices and minimizing the cost of communication. In the first instantiation, we consider a centralized approach in which a cluster head is responsible for maintaining the list of capabilities and assigning tasks to devices based on their capabilities. We present a modified version of the Hungarian method that allows for balancing the load on devices. In the second instantiation, we consider a distributed approach in which devices advertise and find capabilities through an overlay network. The overlay is designed to capitalize on locality and thus seeks to minimize the cost in finding devices with certain capabilities. We evaluate the performance of our TC through extensive simulation experiments complemented by a realistic implementation on a set of devices.