Dynamic Reliability Management of Multigateway IoT Edge Computing Systems

Abstract

The emerging paradigm of edge computing envisions to overcome the shortcomings of cloud-centric Internet of Things (IoT) by providing data processing and storage capabilities closer to the source of data. Accordingly, IoT edge devices, with the increasing demand of computation workloads on them, are prone to failures more than ever. Hard failures in hardware due to aging and reliability degradation are particularly important since they are irrecoverable, requiring maintenance for the replacement of defective parts, at high costs. In this article, we propose a novel dynamic reliability management (DRM) technique for multigateway IoT edge computing systems to mitigate degradation and defer early hard failures. Taking advantage of the edge computing architecture, we utilize gateways for computation offloading with the primary goal of maximizing the battery lifetime of edge devices, while satisfying the Quality of Service (QoS) and reliability requirements. We present a two-level management scheme, which work together to 1) choose the offloading rates of edge devices; 2) assign edge devices to gateways; and 3) decide multihop data flow routes and rates in the network. The offloading rates are selected by a hierarchical multitimescale distributed controller. We assign edge devices by solving a bottleneck generalized assignment problem (BGAP) and compute optimal flows in a fully distributed fashion, leveraging the subgradient method. Our results, based on real measurements and trace-driven simulation, demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve a similar battery lifetime and better QoS compared to the state-of-the-art approaches while satisfying reliability requirements, where other approaches fail by a large margin.