Research In Process Migration In Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Emergence of high-bandwidth wireless networks and advances in microprocessor technology have created a whole new field of distributed computing. Nowadays, individual computing nodes are more and more likely to be mobile at least part of the time and, with the increase in computing power and communication capabilities, it has become feasible for mobile nodes to form one distributed system on top of mobile ad hoc network, enabling them to work collectively and share resources.Traditional resource sharing systems, such as MOSIX, expect to lay on top of a fast and static communication channel, and cannot function on top of a volatile and slow wireless links. To be able to work also on top of a highly dynamic Mobile Ad Hoc Networks, the system needs to take characteristics of such network into account as well as be able to cope with the exceptional circumstances that necessarily occur in such system.In the end this comes down to developing a protocol for propagating information needed by the distributed system as well as modifying process migration mechanism so that it can deal with lost processes and other events due to link failures, When the lower layer of the system has been modified in this way, the upper layers can be left untouched and can be used as such.In this work we develop Cluster Forming Protocol (CFP) for cluster forming and information propagation and modify MOSIX to work with this protocol, and also to take care of traveling and lost processes. This way we are able to use existing mechanisms with only minimal modifications. The protocol has been tested in simulation and MOSIX under real-world circumstances. Our results prove that the idea works and such system can be built.