Maximizing the Wearable Network Lifetime through Virtualized Application Function Chaining

摘要

The smart devices usage is growing rapidly driven by innovative new smart wearables and service offerings. This has led to applications that utilize multiple devices around the body to provide immersive environments such as mixed reality that rely on a number of different types of functions and require considerable resources. Thus one of the major challenges in supporting these applications is dependent on the battery lifetime of devices that provide the necessary functionality. The focus of this paper is to improve the battery efficiency through intelligent resources utilization. We show that, when the same resource is available on multiple devices that form part of the wearable system, it is possible to consider them as a resource pool and further utilize them intelligently to improve the system lifetime via function virtualization. We formulate the intelligent function allocation algorithm as a Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) optimization problem and propose an efficient heuristic solution. Next, we demonstrate the orchestration of the virtualized functions in order to achieve specific functionalities. The experimental data driven simulation results show that approximately 40-50% system battery life improvement can be achieved with proper function allocation and orchestration.