An Approach to QoS-based Task Distribution in Edge Computing Networks for IoT Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as part of the infrastructures for advancing a large variety of applications involving connections of many intelligent devices, leading to smart communities. Due to the severe limitation of the computing resources of IoT devices, it is common to offload tasks of various applications requiring substantial computing resources to computing systems with sufficient computing resources, such as servers, cloud systems, and/or data centers for processing. However, this offloading method suffers from both high latency and network congestion in the IoT infrastructures.

Recently edge computing has emerged to reduce the negative impacts of tasks offloading to remote computing systems. As edge computing is in close proximity to IoT devices, it can reduce the latency of task offloading and reduce network congestion. Yet, edge computing has its drawbacks, such as the limited computing resources of some edge computing devices and the unbalanced loads among these devices. In order to effectively explore the potential of edge computing to support IoT applications, it is necessary to have efficient task management and load balancing in edge computing networks.

In this dissertation research, an approach is presented to periodically distributing tasks within the edge computing network while satisfying the quality-of-service (QoS) requirements of tasks. The QoS requirements include task completion deadline and security requirement. The approach aims to maximize the number of tasks that can be accommodated in the edge computing network, with consideration of tasks’ priorities. The goal is achieved through the joint optimization of the computing resource allocation and network bandwidth provisioning. Evaluation results show the improvement of the approach in increasing the number of tasks that can be accommodated in the edge computing network and the efficiency in resource utilization.