This paper presents a basic and an extended heuristic to distribute operating system (OS) services over mobile ad hoc networks. The heuristics are inspired by the foraging behavior of ants and are used within our NanoOS, an OS for distributed applications. The NanoOS offers an uniform environment of execution and the code of the OS is distributed among nodes. We propose a basic and an extended swarm optimization based heuristic to control the service migration in order to reduce the communication overhead. In the basic one, each service request leaves pheromone in the nodes on its path to the service provider (like ants leave pheromone when foraging). An optimization step occurs when the service provider migrates to the neighbor node with the higher pheromone concentration. The proposed extension takes into account the position of the node in the network and its energy. Realized simulations have shown that the basic heuristic performs well. The total communication cost in average is just 40% higher than the global optimum. In addition, both heuristics have a low computational requirement.
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