Network-Transparent Load Balancing and Migration for Edge Computing

The network infrastructure in a smart community uses the cloud and compute servers, and the edge and fog areas to perform processing in the optimal place. Nodes in the edge and fog areas have various processing capacities, and there must be load-balancing mechanisms to meet the requirements of applications. However, Internet of Things (IoT) devices are generally small, computationally constrained, and numerous, so reconfiguration and functionality updates for the network must be kept to a minimum. In addition, if nodes establish connections with other nodes to exchange their information, the number of connections will be large, and communication costs will be high. In this study, we use nodes called “Distributor” that can monitor data flow through the network without changing the existing infrastructure. Piggyback technique is used to add information onto the packets flowing in the network. Distributors add the information to the packets and exchange information to each other without establishing connections with other nodes, and they perform load balancing based on the information. By changing and migrating the processing locations among Distributors, IoT devices can continue to communicate with other nodes even during load balancing. Experiments confirmed that load balancing could be performed to prepare for sudden load increases and that the impact of piggybacking on occupied bandwidth and processing delay was 0.177% and 0.06%, respectively. We also confirmed that sensor data can be sent without reconnecting communications, even during load balancing.