Recycling Edge Devices in Sustainable Internet of Things Networks

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices have different operation principles, which weakens the data interoperability. Virtualization is an economic way of solving this problem. The data—collected by different vendors’ sensors—share the same computing program encapsulated by the virtual machine (VM), so that the physical-layer difference can be hidden. To eliminate the extra cost and long delay of transferring VMs to the remote cloud, the edge device (ED) processes local VMs’ requirements in prior. Hence, the sustainable strategy for recycling EDs is an important way to safeguard the network sustainability. To improve the recycling efficiency, most of the EDs should be upgraded simultaneously during one batch by migrating their local VMs to others for the service continuity. We investigate the least upgrade batch for recycling EDs in IoT networks. A two-step algorithm called minimized upgrade batch VM scheduling and bandwidth planning (MSBP) is designed to minimize the number of upgrade batches. As the frequent VM migration brings the bandwidth consumption and contention of trajectories, in our MSBP, two strategies: 1) shortest trajectory first and 2) least bandwidth utilization first (LBUF), are also considered. The simulation results show that: 1) MSBP has the optimal recycling efficiency (least number of upgrade batches) for EDs and 2) LBUF more effectively mitigates the negative impact of the path contention level on the recycling efficiency.