Energy-aware task allocation over MANETs

Since the emergence of mobile computing, reducing energy consumption of battery-operated computing devices has become a very active research area. The widespread popularity of mobile computing devices, such as laptops, handheld devices and cell phones, motivates this research area. Several hardware based techniques have been proposed; this has led to more energy-efficient systems. Nevertheless, it is presumed in the literature of energy-aware design that software based techniques have the potential to reduce energy demand and contribute to solve the problem. In this paper, we look into the problem of distributing computational tasks amongst a set of mobile computing devices in a mobile wireless ad hoc network (MANET) in such a way that reduces the total consumed energy. In such a distributed environment, the assignment of computational tasks to different devices plays a vital role in energy conservation. The main contributions of this paper are formulating a novel energy-aware allocation problem and proposing a heuristic-based greedy algorithm to solve it approximately. Our allocation algorithm assigns a set of computational tasks, which may communicate with each other, into a set of heterogeneous processors in such a way that minimizes the total consumed energy. Experiments show that our algorithm is near-optimal in most of the tested benchmarks.