SAP: An IoT Application Module Placement Strategy Based on Simulated Annealing Algorithm in Edge-Cloud Computing

The Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly growing and provides the foundation for the development of smart cities, smart home, and health care. With more and more devices connecting to the Internet, huge amounts of data are produced, creating a great challenge for data processing. Traditional cloud computing has the problems of long delays. Edge computing is an extension of cloud computing, processing data at the edge of the network can reduce the long processing delay of cloud computing. Due to the limited computing resources of edge servers, resource management of edge servers has become a critical research problem. However, the structural characteristics of the subtask chain between each pair of sensors and actuators are not considered to address the task scheduling problem in most existing research. To reduce processing latency and energy consumption of the edge-cloud system, we propose a multilayer edge computing system. The application deployed in the system is based on directed digraph. To fully use the edge servers, we proposed an application module placement strategy using Simulated Annealing module Placement (SAP) algorithm. The modules in an application are bounded to each sensor. The SAP algorithm is designed to find a module placement scheme for each sensor and to generate a module chain including the mapping of the module and servers for each sensor. Thus, the edge servers can transmit the tuples in the network with the module chain. To evaluate the efficacy of our algorithm, we simulate the strategy in iFogSim. Results show the scheme is able to achieve significant reductions in latency and energy consumption.