Resource optimization in fog enabled IoT deployments

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are typically deployed in resource (energy, computational capacity) constrained environments. Connecting such devices to the cloud is not practical due to variable network behavior as well as high latency overheads. Fog computing refers to a scalable, distributed computing architecture which moves computational tasks closer to Edge devices or smart gateways. As an example of mobile IoT scenarios, in robotic deployments, computationally intensive tasks such as run time mapping may be performed on peer robots or smart gateways. Most of these computational tasks involve running optimization algorithms inside compute nodes at run time and taking rapid decisions based on results. In this paper, we incorporate optimization libraries within the Robot Operating System (ROS) deployed on robotic sensor-actuators. Using the ROS based simulation environment Gazebo, we demonstrate case-study scenarios for runtime optimization. The use of optimized distributed computations are shown to provide significant improvement in latency and battery saving for large computational loads. The possibility to perform run time optimization opens up a wide range of use-cases in mobile IoT deployments.