A Distributed Deployment Algorithm of Process Fragments With Uncertain Traffic Matrix

• Published in: IEEE eTransactions on network and service management 2017-09, Vol.14 (3), p.690-701
• Main Authors: Hou, Shoulu, Zhao, Shuai, Cheng, Bo, Chen, Shiping, Cheng, Yongyang, Chen, Junliang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Algorithms; Business; business process; Communications traffic; Computational modeling; Computer simulation; Data acquisition; Data centers; deployment; Fragmentation; Fragments; hardware-in-the-loop; Hardware-in-the-loop simulation; Internet of Things; Measurement uncertainty; Monitoring; Partitioning algorithms; Servers; Uncertainty
• ISSN: 1932-4537; 1932-4537
• DOI: 10.1109/TNSM.2017.2728863

Modern Internet of Things (IoT)-aware business processes include various geographically dispersed sensor devices. Large amounts of raw data acquired from sensors need to be regularly transmitted to the targeted processes in enterprise data centers, resulting in a significant increase in network load and latency. It is necessary to execute such processes in a distributed way. The existing work has proposed different algorithms to partition a given process for distributed execution; however, they cannot satisfy the decentralized nature of IoT-aware business processes. Moreover, up to now, there is few work that studies uncertain optimal deployment problems in which traffic data for guiding subsequent deployment derives from experts' empirical knowledge. This paper proposes a novel location-based fragmentation algorithm and α-optimal deployment solution to deal with the mentioned problems, where α is the given confidence level. A hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform based on NS-3 was built. Based on this platform, an integrated monitoring process was deployed that ran on different virtual computers, and process fragments communicated with each other via a simulated network. The experimental results show that the proposed approach can reduce network traffic and round-trip time.