Wireless distributed computing: a survey of research challenges

Recent advancements in radio technology provide great flexibility and enhanced capabilities in executing wireless services. One of these capabilities that can provide significant advantages over traditional approaches is the concept of collaborative computing in wireless networks. With collaborative radio nodes, multiple independent radio nodes operate together to form a wireless distributed computing (WDC) network with significantly increased performance, operating efficiency, and abilities over a single node. WDC exploits wireless connectivity to share processing- intensive tasks among multiple devices. The goals are to reduce per-node and network resource requirements, and enable complex applications not otherwise possible, e.g., image processing in a network of small form factor radio nodes. As discussed in this article, WDC research aims to quantify the benefits of distributed processing over local processing, extend traditional distributed computing (DC) approaches to allow operation in dynamic radio environments, and meet design and implementation challenges unique to WDC with the help of recently available enabling technologies, such as software radios and cognitive radios.