Exporting processing power of home embedded devices to global computing applications

In today's life we are surrounded by numerous embedded devices that serve our daily needs, without being continuously in use. This fact, in conjunction with the tremendous growth of these devices, results in considerable idle time in a home environment. In other words, we are in the middle of a significant amount of underutilized processing power. Here we investigate the idea of exploiting the unused embedded processing power to execute intensive global computing applications, and the hardware and software issues that arise from such an approach. We present a framework enabling the participation of home embedded devices to the global computing grid, which we call e-grid (embedded grid), along with a theoretical analysis of its performance gain. We also develop an experimental setup based on Jini technology, and measure its actual performance, trying to explore the feasibility of the e-grid approach.