Grids in a Mobile World: Akogrimo's Network and Business Views

Abstract — The use of wireless networking technolo-gies has emerged over recent years in many application domains. The area of grids determines a potentially huge application domain, since the typical centralized comput-ing centers require access from anywhere, e.g. , from field engineers who are situated in a wireless network domain. Thus, the integration of suitable business views on mo-bile grids, of grid views on available technologies, and network views in a fully IP-based network domain de-termines the key challenge. The Akogrimo project’s ar-chitecture developed, is outlined and discussed in this paper and provides the major details required to offer a fully integrated and interoperable solution for those three views of concern. Index Terms — Mobile Grid, Accounting, Charging, IP-based Grid Services, Multi-domain, Dynamic Virtual Organization I. I NTRODUCTION Mobility has become a central aspect of life for people in business, education, and leisure. Related mobile 3G network infrastructures and user communities have surpassed corre-sponding Internet figures. Independent of this development, grid technology is evolving from a niche market – solely addressing the High Performance Computing (HPC) domain – toward a framework useable within a broad business con-text. However, while affecting largely identical complex applications, determined as user and provider domains, until now the grid community has been basically mobility-unaware. Therefore, the Akogrimo project (Access to Knowledge through the Grid in a Mobile World) [2] aims to radically advance the pervasiveness of grid computing across regions, basically by leveraging the large base of mo-bile users. In order to achieve this goal and in addition to embracing layers and technologies, which are supposed to make up the so-called Next Generation Grids (NGG) such as knowledge-related and semantics-driven web services, Akogrimo architects and prototypes a blueprint of an NGG. Akogrimo exploits and closely co-operates with evolving mobile Internet infrastructures based on IPv6 and integrates security as well as dynamicity aspects. From a technical point of view, Akogrimo addresses in an integrated manner mobility, Quality-of-Service (QoS), Au-thentication, Authorization, Accounting, Auditing, and Charging (A4C), and security functionalities, which are pro-vided by corresponding network-related Akogrimo middle-ware systems. To pursue this goal, Akogrimo addresses at the same time the Grid and the Internet with an integrative architectural view. From a user’s point of view, Akogrimo will provide the technologies and concepts to establish a ‘virtual home', with nomadic and mobile environments for solving complex problems across network technology and provider domains. In generalizing the core grid concept – namely the re-source-sharing concept – Akogrimo patterns these environ-ments as Mobile Dynamic Virtual Organizations (MDVO) [34]. The MDVO concept incorporates network-identity-based concepts of personalization, profiling, privacy, secu-rity, and trust. Finally, from the provider’s and, thus, busi-ness point of view, an Akogrimo world provides new busi-ness models and opportunities, making NGGs a reality and preparing them commercially viable for future use. Thus, this overview paper will address the essential busi-ness model classifications for mobile grids as well as the key grid and networking technologies. Based on this description the development of the Akogrimo architecture handles the actor and role interrelations within mobile grids, addressing business, grid, and network views. This approach covers key characteristics as well as major functional components re-quired and integrates a middleware design process with a business-driven view point. To enable a complete spectrum of grid services, the respective network support integrates mobility, QoS support, a SIP-based signaling infrastructure, authentication, authorization, accounting, auditing, charging, context management, and service discovery. Thus, the key concern of a mobile grid, the offering of integrated services, has been mitigated. The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Sec-tion II discusses the key backgrounds. While Section III outlines the basic Akogrimo Architecture, sections IV, V, and VI determine its main business, grid, and network mid-dleware-related aspects. Section VII finally summarizes the work and draws preliminary conclusions.