Energy-aware task allocation for small devices in wireless networks

The continuous advances in wireless networking and mobile computing technologies have paved the way to the spreading of new classes of distributed applications running on networks of small devices such as smartphones and tablets. An issue that still prevents a wider implementation of distributed applications in wireless networks is the lack of task allocation strategies addressing both the energy constraints of small devices and the decentralized nature of wireless networks. In this paper, we focus on this twofold issue by proposing an energy-aware scheduling strategy for allocating computational tasks over a wireless network of small devices in a decentralized but effective way. The main design principle of our scheduling strategy is finding a task allocation that prolongs the total lifetime of the network and maximizes the number of alive devices by balancing the energy load among them. A simulation analysis has been performed to assess the performance of the proposed strategy in different network and application scenarios. The results show that by using the proposed energy-aware task allocation approach, the network lifetime is extended and the number of alive devices is significantly higher compared with alternative scheduling strategies while meeting application-level performance constraints.