Context-Aware Task Migration for HART-Centric Collaboration over FiWi Based Tactile Internet Infrastructures

Abstract

Low task execution time and low energy consumption of collaborating mobile human users and robots are important requirements of emerging human-agent-robot teamwork (HART)-centric Tactile Internet applications. In particular, task migration among mobile HART members has emerged as an important research topic, taking different task types, task deadlines, collaborative node capabilities, and mobility patterns into account. We propose a context-aware task migration scheme for efficiently orchestrating the real-time collaboration among human mobile users, central and decentralized computational agents (cloud/cloudlets), and collaborative robots (cobots) across converged fiber-wireless (FiWi) communications infrastructures. We investigate the problem of whether and, if so, when and where a HART-centric task should be best migrated to. For resource-efficient task execution, the migration decision is made according to given task processing capabilities of cloud/cloudlet agents and cobots, task execution deadline, energy consumption of involved cobots and mobile devices, and task migration latency. We evaluate the performance of our context-aware HART-centric task migration scheme and compare it to conventional task execution without migration. Towards this end, we develop an analytical framework for quantifying its performance in terms of a variety of task migration key performance metrics, including task migration gain-overhead ratio, deadline-miss ratio, task response time, and energy consumption efficiency.