Service Migration for Delay-Sensitive IoT Applications in Edge Networks
Xiaocui Li, Zhangbing Zhou, Yasha Wang, Shuiguang Deng, Patrick C. K. Hung · IEEE Transactions on Services Computing · 2025
The proliferation ofInternetofThings (IoT) applications prompts extraordinary demands for the collaboration of large amounts of computational resources provided byIoTdevices in edge networks, and these applications are mostly delay-sensitive. Generally, these resources are encapsulated asIoTservices. Thereafter,IoTapplications can be performed, such that the collaboration of their sub-tasks is achieved through the composition of functionally complementary and geographically contiguousIoTservices. The status of computational resources inIoTdevices may change continuously along with their occupancy and release byIoTservices. Considering the resource-scarceness ofIoTdevices, when the workload ofIoTdevices increases due to more services to be processed, certainIoTdevices may hardly have enough remaining resources to co-host more instances of certainIoTservices prescribed by forthcomingIoTapplications with strict constraints. As a result, the delay satisfaction of both on-running and forthcomingIoTapplications may be negatively impacted, or even hardly be satisfied any longer. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a rEsource-Efficient serviceConfiguration ($E^{2}$rC) mechanism, which aims to optimize the configuration of computational resources provided byIoTdevices with respect to complex requirements prescribed byIoTapplications, through service migration techniques. This service migration problem is formulated as markov multi-phases decisions, which is solved through our enhancedDeepReinforcementLearning (DRL) approach with a two-layerQ-network. Extensive experiments have been conducted upon the dataset of our testbed system. Evaluation results show that our$E^{2}$rCis more efficient than the state-of-art counterparts in satisfying delay constraints ofIoTapplications, while reducing the energy consumption and improving the resource utilization efficiency ofIoTdevices.