Task Farming in Crowd Computing
Derek Gordon Murray, Karthik Nilakant, Jon Crowcroft, Eiko Yoneki · 2013
Crowd computing combines mobile devices and social interactions to achieve largescale distributed computation, by taking advantage of the substantial aggregate bandwidth and processing power offered by opportunistic networks. This chapter begins by establishing a practical limit for the computational capacity of an opportunistic network. It considers the common task farming approach, and evaluates its performance on the same traces. The chapter investigates how a similar technique can be used to improve the performance of task farming. It aims to show that an opportunistic network of mobile devices is a feasible platform for distributed computation. The results demonstrate that such networks can provide a high degree of parallelism. While the results presented in the chapter do not constitute a comprehensive validation of the performance of crowd computing, there are several areas that show promise, and this indicates that further research is necessary. Controlled Vocabulary Terms mobile ad hoc networks; mobile handsets; task analysis