Energy and QoS-Aware Dynamic Reliability Management of IoT Edge Computing Systems

The Internet of Things (IoT) systems, as any electronic or mechanical system, are prone to failures. Hard failures in hardware due to aging and degradation are particularly important since they are irrecoverable, requiring maintenance for the replacement of defective parts, at high costs. In this paper, we propose a novel dynamic reliability management (DRM) technique for IoT edge computing systems to satisfy the Quality of Service (QoS) and reliability requirements while maximizing the remaining energy of the edge device batteries. We formulate a state-space optimal control problem with a battery energy objective, QoS, and terminal reliability constraints. We decompose the problem into low-overhead sub-problems and solve it employing a hierarchical and multi-timescale control approach, distributed over the edge devices and the gateway. Our results, based on real measurements and trace-driven simulation demonstrate that the proposed scheme can achieve a similar battery lifetime compared to the state-of-the-art approaches while satisfying reliability requirements, where other approaches fail to do so.