WIRELESS GRIDS

The scope of the second workshop on wireless grids is to bring together a highly qualified group of people with interest in wireless grids formed by mobile devices such as mobile phones, wireless sensors, and netbooks. Grid networks are well studied over the last decades. Their potential in sharing resources over long distances make those networks more powerful, more robust, and less cost intensive. New application classes taking advantage of high performance computing across grids have been well studied, and has led to a variety of new applications and business models, based on outsourcing computation to shared data grids. The cross over of grid technology into the wireless domain promises to enable new forms of grid computing, taking advantage of the ubiquity and flexibility of mobile devices. Even though mobile devices are connected initially over error prone and energy consuming wireless links, the power of grid technology is entering mobile phones, wireless sensors and other mobile and nomadic devices such as netbooks. Classical grid infrastructures typically work on top of comparatively stable communication infrastructures with broad bandwidth and endpoints with high computational power. In these environments, communication failure can be interpreted as endpoint failure and the grid will exchange the endpoint. In more error-prone and fragile environments of mobile devices with less bandwidth, additional measures are needed to ensure stable communication and compensate for the reduced bandwidth. Particular obstacles to be addressed are hence related to efficiency, stability, reliability and dynamicity. This environment is opening up complete new areas of applications, given that major obstacles can be overcome. Business and sociotechnical policy issues are also emerging as wireless grids research and experimentation progresses. This workshop will help to share knowledge in this young research area.