Cost-driven autonomous mobility

Autonomous mobile programs (AMPs) offer a novel decentralised load management technology where periodic use is made of cost models to decide where to execute in a network. In this paper we demonstrate how sequential programs can be automatically converted into AMPs. The AMPs are generated by an automatic continuation cost analyser that replaces iterations with costed autonomous mobility skeletons (CAMS) that encapsulate autonomous mobility. The CAMS cost model uses an entirely novel continuation cost semantics to predict both the cost of the current iteration and the continuation cost of the remainder of the program. We show that CAMS convey significant performance advantages, e.g. reducing execution time by up to 53%; that the continuation cost models are consistent with the existing AMP cost models; and that the overheads of collecting and utilising the continuation costs are relatively small. We discuss example AMPs generated by the analyser and demonstrate that they have very similar performance to hand-costed CAMS programs. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.