Resource augmentation in Heterogeneous Internet of Things via UAVs

While the Internet infrastructure is growing in reliability and responsiveness, the exponential growth of users, services and Internet of Things (IoT) systems are inevitably going to stretch the resources of Mobile Edge Computing (MEC). Careful planning and deployment of computing and networking resources could significantly aid service proliferation, but they would not suffice. That is, IoT systems are inherently tied to preemptive deployment in areas of interest, and seldom planned for agile deployment in areas of interest (e.g. forest fires) after it's service use has occurred. In remedy, this work will explore the utility of “summoning” drones that could augment MEC resources to improve responsiveness (e.g. introduce computational power within a single hop) or reduce the load on resource constrained devices in the field. The operation and coordination of such drones would build on established literature in Flying Ad Hoc Networks (FANets). This paper will focus on improving the agility of EC via drones in a coordinated FANet, aiming to enable rapid-dissemination of resources to EC systems that are experiencing high operational loads and/or lack of required resources. This is a building block towards systems that would pro-actively leverage “mobile resources” in anticipation of demand, and relinquish such resources when their local resources and accessible backbone would not suffice in meeting their SLAs.