Offloading-Assisted Energy-Balanced IoT Edge Node Relocation for Confident Information Coverage

Abstract

The promising Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) consisting of heterogeneous resource-restricted IoT nodes recently has attracted great attention from both academia and industry communities. However, the battery-powered, computing and communication resource-constrained, and randomly uneven distributed features of the IoT nodes pose several great tough hurdles, including the quality of services of real-time processing, energy efficiency, network lifetime, and coverage holes to the IIoT-based industrial applications. To deal with these challenges, based on the emerging edge computing paradigm and the novel confident information coverage (CIC) model, this paper investigates how to relocate redundant IoT edge nodes to provide timely CIC service in an offloading-assisted energy-balanced manner while extending the network lifetime, which is called as the CIC-based IoT edge node relocation (CICENR) problem. To effectively handle the CICENR problem, we propose an offloading-assisted energy-balanced IoT edge node relocation approach CIC-based offloading-assisted energy-balanced approach (CIC-OAEBA) and the other CIC-based direct replacement approach. Specially, the CIC-OAEBA adopts the Grid-Quorum strategy to quickly detect the redundant IoT edge nodes by offloading the communication-intensive and computing-intensive tasks from grid header nodes to peer IoT edge nodes, and make full use of the cascaded movement strategy to move the nearest redundant IoT edge nodes to the requesting CIC hole locations. Experimental results indicate the proposed approaches remarkably outperform other peer methods in terms of response time, energy efficiency, and especially the network lifetime and coverage performance.