Optimal Allocation of Computation in an IoT Network

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) is being developed for a wide range of applications from home automation and personal fitness, to smart cities. With the extensive growth in adaptation of IoT devices, comes the uncoordinated and substandard designs aimed at promptly making products available to the end consumer. This substandard approach restricts the growth of IoT networks in the near future and necessitates studies to understand requirements of an efficient design. A particular area where IoT applications have grown significantly is the surveillance and monitoring. Applications of IoT in this domain are mainly relying on distributed sensors, each equipped with a battery, capable of collecting images, reprocessing images, and communicating the raw or processed images to the nearest node until it reaches the base station for decision making. In such an IoT network where processing can be distributed over the network, the important research question is how much of data each node should process and how much they should communicate to a given objective. This work answers this question and provides a deeper understanding of energy to delay(performance) trade off with different target metrics.