Optimal Placement of Cloudlets for Access Delay Minimization in SDN-Based Internet of Things Networks

Given the highly dynamic traffic loads of mobile Internet of Things (IoT) devices and their stringent quality-ofservice requirements, i.e., access delay particularly, as well as the heterogeneous infrastructures among IoT networks, it is a nontrivial task to efficiently deploy cloudlets among large number of access points (APs) in IoT networks, especially for the access delay and network reliability, since different placement schemes would produce various network performances. To combat this issue, we are motivated to investigate in details the optimal placement of cloudlets to minimize the average access delay by applying software-defined networking (SDN) techniques to provide flexible and programmable management for cloudlets deployment in IoT networks with considering the complicated queuing process at numerous SDN-based APs. An enumerationbased optimal placement algorithm (EOPA) is first proposed as benchmark. Then we propose a ranking-based near-optimal placement algorithm (RNOPA) which is able to dynamically adapt to mobile IoT devices and their traffic loads, by treating each AP as a single server queue and adopting an efficient ranking mechanism. As corroborated by extensive simulation results, RNOPA reports access delay very close to that of EOPA. Note that RNOPA outperforms the famous K-medians clustering algorithm (KMCA) in both of average cloudlet access delay and reliability, while at the cost of a much lower computational complexity than KMCA.

I. Introduction

Cloudlet framework, as an emerging computing paradigm for Internet of Things (IoT) networks, offloads computing burden of mobile IoT devices through proximity-based services. A cloudlet is a mobility-enhanced, resource-rich, and small-scale data center, which has speedy access to the Internet and mobile IoT devices [1], [2]. One distinct advantage of cloudlets, over the conventional cloud-to-things architecture, is the reduced access delay, as data traffic does not need to travel through the Internet to remote clouds [3]. Access delay is the key concern for quality-of-service (QoS) of mobile IoT devices whose requirement for access delay is quite stringent [4], especially for IoT applications, such as many industrial control systems, gaming, virtual reality, vehicle-to-vehicle communications, vehicle-to-roadside communications, and drone flight control [5].