Allocation of Heterogeneous Resources of an IoT Device to Flexible Services

Internet of Things (IoT) devices can be equipped with multiple heterogeneous network interfaces. An overwhelmingly large amount of services may demand some or all of these interfaces' available resources. Herein, we present a precise mathematical formulation of assigning services to interfaces with heterogeneous resources in one or more rounds. For reasonable instance sizes, the presented formulation produces optimal solutions for this computationally hard problem. We prove the NP-Completeness of the problem and develop two algorithms to approximate the optimal solution for big instance sizes. The first algorithm allocates the most demanding service requirements first, considering the average cost of interfaces resources. The second one calculates the demanding resource shares and allocates the most demanding of them first by choosing randomly among equally demanding shares. Finally, we provide simulation results giving insight into services splitting over different interfaces for both cases.Comment: IEEE Internet of Things Journa

Cooperation and Resource Allocation in Wireless Networking towards the IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) should be able to react with minimal human intervention and contribute to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) era requiring real-time and scalable operation under heterogeneous network infrastructures. This thesis investigates how cooperation and allocation of resources can contribute to the evolution of future wireless networks supporting the IoT. First, we examine how to allocate resources to IoT services which run on devices equipped with multiple network interfaces. The resources are heterogeneous and not interchangeable, and their allocation to a service can be split among different interfaces. We formulate an optimization model for this allocation problem, prove its complexity, and derive two heuristic algorithms to approximate the solution in large instances of the problem. The concept of virtualization is promising towards addressing the heterogeneity of IoT resources by providing an abstraction layer between software and hardware. Network function virtualization (NFV) decouples traditional network operations such a routing from proprietary hardware platforms and implements them as software entities known as virtualized network functions (VNFs). In the second paper, we study how VNF demands can be allocated to Virtual Machines (VMs) by considering the completion-time tolerance of the VNFs. We prove that the problem is NP-complete and devise a subgradient optimization algorithm to provide near-optimal solutions. Our numerical results demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm compared to two benchmark algorithms. Furthermore, we explore the potential of using intermediate nodes, the so-called relays, in IoT networks. In the third paper, we study a multi-user random-access network with a relay node assisting users in transmitting their packets to a destination node. We provide analytical expressions for the performance of the relay's queue and the system throughput. We optimize the relay’s operation parameters to maximize the network-wide throughput while maintaining the relay's queue stability. A stable queue at relay guarantees finite delay for the packets. Furthermore, we study the effect of the wireless links' signal-to-interference-plusnoise ratio (SINR) threshold and the self-interference (SI) cancellation on the per-user and network-wide throughput. Additionally, caching at the network edge has recently emerged as an encouraging solution to offload cellular traffic and improve several performance metrics of the network such as throughput, delay and energy efficiency. In the fourth paper, we study a wireless network that serves two types of traffic: cacheable and non-cacheable traffic. In the considered system, a wireless user with cache storage requests cacheable content from a data center connected with a wireless base station. The user can be assisted by a pair of wireless helpers that exchange non-cacheable content as well. We devise the system throughput and the delay experienced by the user and provide numerical results that demonstrate how they are affected by the non-cacheable packet arrivals, the availability of caching helpers, the parameters of the caches, and the request rate of the user. Finally, in the last paper, we consider a time-slotted wireless system that serves both cacheable and non-cacheable traffic with the assistance of a relay node. The latter has storage capabilities to serve both types of traffic. We investigate how allocating the storage capacity to cacheable and non-cacheable traffic affects the system throughput. Our numerical results provide useful insights into the system throughput e.g., that it is not necessarily beneficial to increase the storage capacity for the non-cacheable traffic to realize better throughput at the non-cacheable destination node

Scheduling Services on an IoT Device Under Time-Weighted Pricing

The emerging vision of smart cities necessitates the use of Internet of Things (IoT) network devices to implement sustainable solutions that will improve the operations of urban areas. A massive amount of smart cities services may demand allocation of computational resources, such as processing power or storage, that IoT devices offer. Within this context, we present an IoT network device comprising interfaces with one specific computational resource available. The efficient utilization of available IoT resources would improve the Quality of Service (QoS) of the IoT network that serves the smart city. All resource allocations must be completed within a given scheduling window and every service is parametrized by a pricing weight function to indicate its tolerance to be served at the beginning of the scheduling window. We propose a mathematical optimization formulation to minimize the total cost of allocating all demands within the scheduling window considering the tolerance level of each service at the same time. Moreover, we prove that the problem is computationally hard and we provide numerical results to gain insight into the impact of different pricing weight functions on the allocations’ distribution within the scheduling window

A wireless caching helper system with heterogeneous traffic and random availability

Multimedia content streaming from Internet-based sources emerges as one of the most demanded services by wireless users. In order to alleviate excessive traffic due to multimedia content transmission, many architectures (e.g., small cells, femtocells, etc.) have been proposed to offload such traffic to the nearest (or strongest) access point also called "helper". However, the deployment of more helpers is not necessarily beneficial due to their potential of increasing interference. In this work, we evaluate a wireless system which can serve both cacheable and non-cacheable traffic. More specifically, we consider a general system in which a wireless user with limited cache storage requests cacheable content from a data center that can be directly accessed through a base station. The user can be assisted by a pair of wireless helpers that exchange non-cacheable content as well. Files not available from the helpers are transmitted by the base station. We analyze the system throughput and the delay experienced by the cached user and show how these performance metrics are affected by the packet arrival rate at the source helper, the availability of caching helpers, the caches parameters, and the users request rate by means of numerical results.Funding Agencies|Linkoping University; CENIIT; ELLIIT</p