Optimal Allocation of Computation and Communication 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 in the near future and necessitates that studies understand requirements for an efficient design. A particular area where IoT applications have grown significantly is surveillance and monitoring. Applications of IoT in this domain are relying on distributed sensors, each equipped with a battery, capable of collecting images, processing images, and communicating the raw or processed data 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 it should communicate for a given objective. This work answers this question and provides a deeper understanding of energy and delay tradeoffs in an IoT network with three different target metrics.