Distributed Trade-Based Edge Device Management in Multi-Gateway IoT

The Internet-of-Things (IoT) envisions an infrastructure of ubiquitous networked smart devices offering advanced monitoring and control services. The current art in IoT architectures utilizes gateways to enable application-specific connectivity to IoT devices. In typical configurations, IoT gateways are shared among several IoT edge devices. Given the limited available bandwidth and processing capabilities of an IoT gateway, the service quality (SQ) of connected IoT edge devices must be adjusted over time not only to fulfill the needs of individual IoT device users but also to tolerate the SQ needs of the other IoT edge devices sharing the same gateway. However, having multiple gateways introduces an interdependent problem, the binding, i.e., which IoT device shall connect to which gateway. In this article, we jointly address the binding and allocation problems of IoT edge devices in a multigateway system under the constraints of available bandwidth, processing power, and battery lifetime. We propose a distributed trade-based mechanism in which after an initial setup, gateways negotiate and trade the IoT edge devices to increase the overall SQ. We evaluate the efficiency of the proposed approach with a case study and through extensive experimentation over different IoT system configurations regarding the number and type of the employed IoT edge devices. Experiments show that our solution improves the overall SQ by up to 56% compared to an unsupervised system. Our solution also achieves up to 24.6% improvement on overall SQ compared to the state-of-the-art SQ management scheme, while they both meet the battery lifetime constraints of the IoT devices.