Service Migration for Delay-Sensitive IoT Applications in Edge Networks

The proliferation of Internet of Things (IoT) applications prompts extraordinary demands for the collaboration of large amounts of computational resources provided by IoT devices in edge networks, and these applications are mostly delay-sensitive. Generally, these resources are encapsulated as IoT services. Thereafter, IoT applications can be performed, such that the collaboration of their sub-tasks is achieved through the composition of functionally complementary and geographically contiguous IoT services. The status of computational resources in IoT devices may change continuously along with their occupancy and release by IoT services. Considering the resource-scarceness of IoT devices, when the workload of IoT devices increases due to more services to be processed, certain IoT devices may hardly have enough remaining resources to co-host more instances of certain IoT services prescribed by forthcoming IoT applications with strict constraints. As a result, the delay satisfaction of both on-running and forthcoming IoT applications may be negatively impacted, or even hardly be satisfied any longer. To solve this issue, this paper proposes a rEsource-Efficient service Configuration ($E^{2}$rC) mechanism, which aims to optimize the configuration of computational resources provided by IoT devices with respect to complex requirements prescribed by IoT applications, through service migration techniques. This service migration problem is formulated as markov multi-phases decisions, which is solved through our enhanced Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approach with a two-layer Q-network. Extensive experiments have been conducted upon the dataset of our testbed system. Evaluation results show that our $E^{2}$rC is more efficient than the state-of-art counterparts in satisfying delay constraints of IoT applications, while reducing the energy consumption and improving the resource utilization efficiency of IoT devices.