An Uncertainty-Driven Proactive Self-Healing Model for Pervasive Applications

Abstract

The ever-increasing demand for services of end-users in the Internet of Things (IoT) often causes great congestion in the nodes dedicated to serving their requests. Such nodes are usually placed at the edge of the network, becoming the intermediates between the IoT infrastructure and Cloud. Edge nodes offer many advantages when adopted to perform processing activities that are realized close to end-users, limiting the latency in the provision of responses. In this article, we attempt to solve the problem of the potential overloading of edge nodes by proposing a mechanism that always keeps free space in their queue to host high-priority processing tasks. We introduce a proactive, self-healing mechanism that utilizes the principles of Fuzzy Logic, in combination with a non-parametric statistical method that reveals the trend of nodes’ loads as depicted by the incoming tasks and their capability to serve them in the minimum possible time. Through our approach, we manage to ensure the uninterrupted service of high-priority tasks, taking into consideration the demand for tasks as well. Based on this approach, we ensure the fastest possible delivery of results to the requestors while keeping the latency for serving high-priority tasks at the lowest possible levels. A set of experimental scenarios is adopted to evaluate the performance of the suggested model by presenting the corresponding numerical results.