ANGELS: A framework for mobile grids

The current emphasis on Internet of Things (IoT) across the globe highlights the extreme importance of sensor-based intelligent and ubiquitous systems which are collectively known as cyber-physical systems. It is envisaged that the technology will create a network of smart devices and things to an unprecedented extent, far outnumbering the number of devices connected in the Internet as we know today. This unprecedented number of interconnected smart devices is likely to generate an unforeseen volume of data of different types, ready for analysis. The smartness of the Intelligent Infrastructures will depend on effective execution of various analytical algorithms on this accumulated dataset which forms the crux of the IoT paradigm. As of now, researchers rely on cloud-based paradigms to analyse the data in a data-parallel fashion, where analyses take place in large data centres comprised of large number of servers. Apart from the servers, there is a huge pool of relatively unused pool of computing resources in form of smart devices in and around our homes, such as mobile phones, home energy gateways, play-stations etc., which we collectively call edge devices. It is our belief that this pool of resources, if used in the right manner, can contribute to a large extent to effective and successful analysis of the data-set generated by the ubiquitous sensors, leading to a proper realization of the Intelligent Infrastructure paradigm, and we call this approach ANGELS computing. In this paper, we describe a framework which allows remote execution of programs within mobile devices and thus can act as one of the building blocks for the IoT paradigm. This is effectively a work-in-progress and it is acknowledged that there will be further challenges in such a framework and we will attempt to solve them during our course of research.