For the definition of a Mobile Grid it is necessary to define first the term Grid. As the meaning of this term has no universally accepted definition and is interpreted in different ways for this article we follow the definition proposed in the Next Generation Grid Expert Group Report


A Grid provides an abstraction for resource sharing and collaboration action across multiple administrative domains...

Applying this definition on Mobile Grids with the obvious additional element of Mobility where a resource is not bound to a certain location and/or to a certain device the definition of a mobile Grid is consequently

A mobile Grid is a Grid with at least one Mobile Grid Resource. A Mobile Grid resource is actively participating in the Grid so that the resource can take the role of either a service consumer or a service provider. A Mobile Grid resource is an active member of at least one Virtual Organization and is involved actively in executing workflows.

We know that this leads to confusion in particular with people coming from the domain of economics where a Virtual Organisation is something different. Our understanding of VOs is closer to what got recently commonly called agile enterprises

A Mobile Dynamic Virtual Organization (MDVO) is a temporary or permanent coalition of geographically dispersed potentially mobile individuals, groups, organizational units or entire organizations that pool resources, capabilities and information, selected from the resources of an Enterprise Network, to contribute to the VO according to the dynamically established contracts typically driven by one ore more business processes.
Virtual Organizations can provide services and thus participate as a single entity in the formation of further Virtual Organizations. This enables the creation of recursive structures with multiple layers of "virtual" value-added service providers.

Within Akogrimo the notion of administrative domain is twofold. First, there are different service providers (e.g. network operators) offering their services on the same conceptual level. And of course there are different service providers offering services on different conceptual levels.
A handover of a mobile terminal from one network to another one is first a technological handover, which in the simplest case, occurs within an administrative domain. However, this kind of handover might occur as well if an operator changes “regional” boundaries which would then result in a handover between administrative domains i.e. switching from a Telefonica to a Portugal Telecom network while crossing the Spanish – Portuguese frontier.

Further, an administrative domain might also be a SAN of other Grid resources as well as pure network content or even parts of a SAN offered by a company. This service provider, content provider of resource provider might operate on their own with or without federations to other operators of the same of different conceptual level.

Yes and no. We are not aiming at a cell phone grid and mobile grid according to our definition is not limited to wireless access networks.

However we do consider clients and also service providers from a wide range of different devices. For example if you look at our video (see download section) you will see a patient with an enabled cell phone starting a Virtual Organisation to be created. The real data analysis is done with a device in the ambulance car and in the hospital afterwards. In the backend for doing the analysis of the health status, accessing the necessary data from different databases is potentially including computational intensive tasks that can only be done by 'real computers'.

We are looking to different kind of mobility. A brief overview

• Device Mobility: Users capacity to move themselves with their devices through different networks, without available services change.
  
• Personnel Mobility: Users capacity to send and receive calls and access subscribed telecommunication services, regardless neither device nor place where they access. Besides, is the network skill to identify user when he is moving. This capacity is based on use single personnel identity.
  
• Session Mobility: Session Mobility is the seamless transfer of media of an ongoing communication session from one device to another.