A Genetic Algorithm-Based Approach for Fluctuating QoS Aware Selection of IoT Services

Abstract

In recent years, the Internet of Things (IoT) has evolved at an exceptional speed, which enables to interconnect a very large number of heterogeneous, distributed, and mobile devices. This number will exceed 70 billion by 2025 according to Statista. <xref ref-type="fn" rid="fn1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">^a</xref> with this huge amount of connected objects, the fulfillment of complex IoT applications, which usually requires a combination of several IoT objects, remains a real challenge. Besides, several requirements of Quality of Service (QoS) must be fulfilled, which makes the problem of selecting the appropriate IoT services NP-hard. In the literature, two main techniques for QoS-driven service selection are proposed: global selection characterized by a poor performance in dynamic and distributed huge environments and local selection which considers pre-defined local QoS constraints. Mainly, the existing works consider static QoS. However, in real life scenarios, QoS of IoT services can be fluctuating. To enhance the reliability of IoT applications, it is of paramount importance to consider the fluctuation dimension. In this context, we propose a QoS fluctuation-aware selection approach of IoT services. To do so, we propose a near-to optimal distributed approach that relies on decomposing the global QoS into distinct local constraints that serve as upper/lower bounds for selection while enhancing the reliability of the resulting composition by considering the QoS fluctuation of the candidate IoT services. The approach, we propose is based on a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm (MOEA) to solve the global QoS decomposition problem. Then a local selection using the obtained local constraints is performed in a parallel and distributed way. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated and validated via experiment series. <fn id="fn1" xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><label>^a</label> <uri>https://www.statista.com/statistics/471264/iot-number-of-connected-devices-worldwide/</uri> </fn>