Edge computing solutions to support computation offloading for IoT applications

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are major stakeholders of contemporary network bandwidth. The proliferation of IoT devices and the demand for latency-free communication in time-critical applications has proven the drawback of cloud-based solutions. Edge computing is an paradigm that reduces the application’s response time by utilizing computation and storage proximate to each devices. Privacy in cloud computing is attained by system virtualization, containerization, among other evolved technologies. As privacy remains a primary concern, there is a need to test the feasibility of resource-constrained edge devices. Hence, this work aimed to examine the usability of such devices in edge computing by benchmarking on different runtime environments. The results reveal that a standard mechanism was achieved for defining the criteria to identify the suitable edge devices for computation offloading, particularly for a set of smart traffic surveillance use cases. Further, an optimization algorithm was designed to generate an optimum schedule that decides the best device to execute a particular task from the set of suitable edge devices to enhance energy and execution time in a global view. Based on the feasibility study and optimal schedule, a makespan that is nearly 11 times better than local execution for the considered traffic surveillance workflow was achieved.