Energy-Efficient Deployment of IoT Applications in Edge-Based Infrastructures: A Software Product Line Approach

In order to lower latency and reduce energy consumption, edge computing proposes offloading some computation-intensive tasks usually performed in the cloud onto nearby devices in the frontier/edge of the access networks. However, the current task offloading approaches are often quite simple. They neither consider the high diversity of hardware and software technologies present in edge network devices nor take into account that some tasks may require some specific software and hardware infrastructure to be executed. This article proposes a task offloading process that leans on software product line technologies, which are a very good option to model the variability of software and hardware present in edge environments. First, our approach automates the separation of application tasks, considering the data and operation needs and restrictions among them, and identifying the hardware and software resources required by each task. Second, our approach models and manages separately the infrastructure available for task offloading, as a set of nodes that provide certain hardware and software resources. This separation allows to reason about alternative offloading of tasks with different hardware and software resource requirements, in heterogeneous nodes and minimizing energy consumption. In addition, the offloading process considers alternative implementations of tasks to choose the one that best fits the hardware and software characteristics of the available edge network infrastructure. The experimental results show that our approach reduces the energy consumption in the user node by approximately 41%–62%, and the energy consumption of the devices involved in a task offloading solution by 34%–48%.