Challenges of Using Edge Devices in IoT Computation Grids

Internet of Things (IoT) has the potential to become a technology revolution with a vision of creating very large scale network, comprising of unprecedented number of connected devices. These devices, often referred to as smart items or intelligent things can be home appliances, healthcare devices, vehicles, buildings, factories and almost anything networked and fitted with sensors, actuators, embedded computers. There has been sustained research work and standardization effort from different IoT perspectives like integration of sensor and RFID devices to the Internet. With the increasing trend of gathering business insights from unstructured data, the high volume of data generated by such devices is also of interest. Cloud based data mining platforms are suitable for analyses of such data and researchers have proposed architectures where personal mobile phones can act as Edge Gateway between the sensor network and cloud analytics platform. It seems that the surge in the volume of data generated by huge number of Smart Items can only be matched if a large percentage of mobile users start sharing the computation capability of their personal devices and work together towards true Participatory Computing in the IoT systems. In this work we try to understand the challenges associated with running computation jobs on the mobile devices using different types of workload often observed in IoT applications. Based on the insights gained from experiments performed by us, we propose a scheme where mobile phones, residential gateways and other edge devices offer free slots to servers in a cloud based data analytics system. Based on the free time slots offered by the mobile phones, if commensurately sized computational jobs can be scheduled, the unpredictability associated with using mobile phones as grid resources can be solved.