Optimizing Response Time in SDN-Edge Environments for Time-Strict IoT Applications

Abstract: The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) has opened new research lines that focus on applying IoT applications to domains further beyond basic user-grade applications, such as Industry or Healthcare. These domains demand a very high Quality of Service (QoS), mainly a very short response time. In order to meet these demands, some works are evaluating how to modularize and deploy IoT applications in different nodes of the infrastructure (edge, fog, cloud), as well as how to place the network controllers, since these decisions affect the response time of the application. Some works in the literature have approached this problem by providing separate plans for deployment and placing of controllers. However, this approach makes sub-optimal decisions, that complicate guaranteeing the demanded response time. To guarantee an optimal response time, it is crucial to solve the problem in a single effort that considers both, the networking and computing dimensions. In this work, we analyze the influences between the response time of computing and networking in edge computing environments with SDN networks, merging both optimization efforts into a single one and proposing a solution to the joint problem. Our evaluation shows that our proposal can shorten response time by up to 28.97%