An Approach to QoS-based Task Distribution in Edge Computing Networks for IoT Applications

Internet of Things (IoT) is emerging as part of the infrastructures for advancing a large variety of applications involving connection of many intelligent devices, leading to smart communities. Due to the severe limitation on the computing resources of IoT devices, it is common to offload tasks of various applications requiring substantial computing resources to computing systems with sufficient computing resources, such as servers, cloud systems, and/or data centers for processing. However, the offloading method suffers from the difficulties of high latency and network congestion in the IoT infrastructures. Recently edge computing has emerged to reduce the negative impacts of these difficulties. Yet, edge computing has its drawbacks, such as the limited computing resources of some edge computing devices and the unbalanced load among these devices. In order to effectively explore the potential of edge computing to support IoT applications, it is necessary to have efficient task management in edge computing networks. In this paper, an approach is presented to periodically distributing incoming tasks in the edge computing network so that the number of tasks, which can be processed in the edge computing network, is increased, and the quality of-service (QoS) requirements of the tasks completed in the edge computing network are satisfied. Simulation results are presented to show the improvement of using this approach on the increase of the number of tasks to be completed in the edge computing network.