Access for Mobile Users

GridLab Mobile Home

Motivation

Small and flexible mobile devices are increasingly used for web access to various remote resources. This working package wants to provide grid access mechanisms for such devices. This requires adaption of existing access technologies like portals for low bandwidth connectivity and low level end user hardware. The mobile nature of such devices also requires flexible session management and data synchronization. This work package will enhance the scope of present grid environments to the emerging mobile domain. Utilizing the new higher bandwidth mobile interconnects, very useful and previously impossible scenarios of distributed and collaborative computing can be realized.

Place in the GridLab architecture

Access to Grid(Lab) mobile services

The main goal of our efforts is to give the Grid users a possibility to access their applications and resources from any place using mobile devices. According to our approach the devices are incorporated only as the clients of Grid services (not peers). Moreover, because of limitations of mobile devices this approach assumes adopting a gateway between the client and the Grid. These limitations forced us to pay special attention to build flexible user interfaces as well.

We developed (or co-developed) also several specialized mobile-oriented Grid services. In some cases we provided only a mobile wrap-up of the heavyweight Grid services placed in the gateway. Some of them are build from the scratch as a specialised mobile service.

Our mobile client is tighty coupled with the gateway. This "connection" means that features in the mobile client are mapped to corresponding plugins in the gateway. Those plugins are responsible for interacting with Grid services in the name of the mobile client.

Minimal Grid Interface

The below schema presents our approach: we give mobile users access to Grid services via gateway. The mobile client running on a mobile device together with the gateway make up the Minimal Grid Interface.