IoT Services Allocation at the Edge via Named Data Networking: From Optimal Bounds to Practical Design

Edge computing is a key paradigm to offload the core network and effectively process massive Internet of Things (IoT) raw data without sending them to the cloud. This paradigm normally relies on a set of purpose-built and pre-planned servers, which host storage and processing resources to provide IoT services close to the data sources, thus saving core network resources and offloading the remote cloud infrastructure. In this paper, we propose to turn the network edge into a dynamic, distributed computing environment that supports the provisioning of IoT services, by exploiting the recent evolution of Named Data Networking (NDN), supporting both name-based data retrieval and computation. Specific name structure and novel NDN forwarding mechanisms are designed; a distributed strategy is also engineered to select the service executor among edge nodes, with the objectives to (i) limit the raw IoT data traffic crossing the network, and (ii) allocate the service execution according to the nodes’ available processing resources. Numerical analysis shows that the performance of the proposed framework approaches the one of the optimal solution of a formulated Integer Linear Programming problem. System-level ndnSIM simulations confirm that the proposal also outperforms the considered state-of-the-art benchmark solutions in terms of service provisioning time.