Advances in virtualization technologies and edge computing have inspired a new paradigm for Internet-of-Things (IoT) application development. By breaking a monolithic application
into loosely coupled microservices, great gain can be achieved in performance, flexibility and robustness. In this paper, we study the important problem of load balancing across IoT
microservice instances. A key difficulty in this problem is the interdependencies among microservices: the load on a successor microservice instance directly depends on the load distributed from its predecessor microservice instances. We propose a graph-based model for describing the load dependencies among microservices. Based on the model, we first propose a basic formulation for load balancing, which can be solved optimally in polynomial time. The basic model neglects the quality-of-service (QoS) of the IoT application. We then propose a QoS-aware load balancing model, based on a novel abstraction that captures a
realization of the application’s internal logic. The QoS-aware load balancing problem is NP-hard. We propose a fully polynomialtime approximation scheme for the QoS-aware problem. We show through simulation experiments that our proposed algorithm achieves enhanced QoS compared to heuristic solutions.
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Application Provisioning in FOG Computing-enabled Internet-of-Things: A Network Perspective
The emergence of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has inspired numerous new applications. However, due to the limited resources in current IoT infrastructures and the stringent quality-of-service requirements of the applications, providing computing and communication supports for the applications is becoming increasingly difficult. In this paper, we consider IoT applications that receive continuous data streams from multiple sources in the network, and study joint application placement and data routing to support all data streams with both bandwidth and delay guarantees. We formulate the application provisioning problem both for a single application and for multiple applications, with both cases proved to be NP-hard. For the case with a single application, we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme. For the multi-application scenario, if the applications can be parallelized among multiple distributed instances, we propose a fully polynomial-time approximation scheme; for general non-parallelizable applications, we propose a randomized algorithm and analyze its performance. Simulations show that the proposed algorithms greatly improve the quality-of-service of the IoT applications compared to the heuristics.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10095999
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE INFOCOM'2018
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 783 to 791
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/INFOCOM.2018.8486269
