An Efficient Processing Scheme for Concurrent Applications in the IoT Edge

Due to the large volume of IoT data, conventional sensor network based and the cloud base IoT systems cannot handle latency-sensitive and resource-consuming IoT applications. Sensor networks do not have enough computation resources and also suffer from a limited network lifetime. On the other hand, the cloud based IoT system is far away from the users and the physical world, and cannot satisfy the real-time requirement of IoT applications. We adopt the IoT edge network to address these challenges and process IoT applications in modern IoT systems. The IoT edge network is an emerging computing architecture in the IoT. Compared to the sensor nodes in conventional sensor networks, the edge servers have more computation resources. Compared to the remote cloud, the edge servers are closer to the users and the physical world. However, processing IoT applications in the edge network still remains challenging. First, how to process concurrent IoT applications has not been fully investigated. Second, the inner relationship between the network resource and the application latency has not been deeply analyzed. Third, the function conflict problem in edge servers has not been taken seriously. To solve the above challenges, we propose the Energy and Latency Efficient Processing Plan for Concurrent IoT Applications Problem which aims to construct an application processing plan by jointly considering the concurrency, the energy-latency relationship, and the function conflict problems. We prove that such a problem is NP-Hard, and algorithms are proposed accordingly. Furthermore, we also estimate the performance of the proposed algorithms by numerical results.