In-situ resource provisioning with adaptive scale-out for regional IoT services

In an era where billions of IoT devices have been deployed, edge/fog computing paradigms are attracting attention for their ability to reduce processing delays and communication overhead. In order to improve Quality of Experience (QoE) of regional IoT services that create timely geo-spatial information in response to users’ queries, it is important to efficiently allocate sufficient resources based on the computational demand of each service. However since edge/fog devices are assumed to be heterogeneous (in terms of their computational power, network performance to other devices, deployment density, etc.), provisioning computational resources according to computational demand becomes a challenging constrained optimization problem. In this paper, we formulate a delay constrained regional IoT service provisioning (dcRISP) problem. dcRISP assigns computational resources of devices based on the demand of the regional IoT services in order to maximize users’ QoE. We also present dcRISP+, an extension of dcRISP, that enables resource selection to extend beyond the initial area in order to satisfy increasing computational demands. We propose a provisioning algorithm, in-situ resource area selection with adaptive scale out and in-situ task scheduling based on a tabu search, to solve the dcRISP+ problem. We conducted a simulation study of a tourist area in Kyoto where 4,000 IoT devices and 3 types of IoT services were deployed. Results show that our proposed algorithms can obtain higher user QoE compared to conventional resource provisioning algorithms.