Latency-aware scheduling for data-oriented service requests in collaborative IoT-edge-cloud networks

Edge computing facilitates the collaboration of physical devices at the network edge to support nearby computing requests, in order to reduce long-distance sensory data transmission from Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the remote cloud. An IoT-edge-cloud network is constructed, where sensory data collected by IoT devices is aggregated to the physically adjacent edge nodes and is transmitted between these edge nodes for achieving task processing, and the cloud acts as a central controller with global scheduling, considering the latency sensitivity of service requests and capacity limitation of physical devices. These service requests are decomposed into multiple data-oriented tasks with certain logical relations, and the satisfaction of service requests is implemented in such a collaborative IoT-edge-cloud network. In this setting, a data-oriented task scheduling mechanism is presented through considering data aggregation, data transmission and task processing in a latency-efficient and energy-saving fashion, which is formulated as a constrained objective optimization problem. We develop an improved Genetic Algorithm-based Task Scheduling (iGATS) approach, where task scheduling decisions are regarded as chromosome codings, fitness function and genetic operators are designed to solve the formulated problem. Simulation experiments are evaluated, and numerical results show that our iGATS outperforms other baseline techniques for reducing response latency, improving temporal satisfaction of service requests, and maintaining load-balancing across the whole network.