Towards Supporting IoT System Designers in Edge Computing Deployment Decisions

The rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) systems demands addressing new requirements. This particularly needs efficient deployment of IoT systems to meet the quality requirements such as latency, energy consumption, privacy, and bandwidth utilization. The increasing availability of computational resources close to the edge has prompted the idea of using these for distributed computing and storage, known as edge computing. Edge computing may help and complement cloud computing to facilitate deployment of IoT systems and improve their quality. However, deciding where to deploy the various application components is not a straightforward task, and IoT system designer should be supported for the decision. To support the designers, in this thesis we focused on the system qualities, and aimed for three main contributions. First, by reviewing the literature, we identified the relevant and most used qualities and metrics. Moreover, to analyse how computer simulation can be used as a supporting tool, we investigated the edge computing simulators, and in particular the metrics they provide for modeling and analyzing IoT systems in edge computing. Finally, we introduced a method to represent how multiple qualities can be considered in the decision. In particular, we considered distributing Deep Neural Network layers as a use case and raked the deployment options by measuring the relevant metrics via simulation.