The Activity of Resource Allocation

Abstract

In this chapter, we address the resource allocation , which is the main activity in a holistic resource management process for Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems . We discuss existing approaches that tackle the challenges of providing a resource allocation system for the IoT . We focus our discussion on works addressing the challenges from an architectural point of view, proposing the main components involved in the resource allocation activity along with their functionalities and operation. Existing proposals differ in several aspects, but in this chapter, we group them according to the number of tiers involved in the resource allocation . First, we discuss works focused on the cloud tier, in which the main players in the allocation process are the virtualized data centres at the cloud. In such proposals, the IoT devices are passive entities only in charge of producing data to be processed at the cloud. Then, we discuss approaches that distribute the workload between the IoT devices and the cloud. Following, we present the proposals in which the main players in the resource allocation process are the IoT devices themselves, the so-called IoT only approached. Finally, we briefly present works that exploit resource utilization at the edge of the network, thus adopting a three-tier architecture for IoT and dealing with the allocation process considering these three tiers, with their distinct features.