LOADHoC: Towards the Automatic Local Distribution of Computation Using Existing IoT Devices

Mobile devices often use offloading nodes to reduce the amount of power used locally, or because of the low computational power of the device. Mobile devices can take advantage of offloading to reduce the power usage and increase the battery life of the device. Cloud offloading architectures are largely out of the users control and have higher latency than running the computation on the local device. Cloud computing architectures use specialised nodes, which need to be designed for the service provider. As more Internet of Things (IoT) devices are created and deployed, the number of idle devices also increases. These devices use power to stay in an idle state, which constitutes an inefficient usage of computational resources; both as network resources and physical materials used to make the device. To address an alternative to cloud offloading architectures, this work proposes an architecture for taking advantage of idle computing power of IoT devices for offloading computations from devices locally to improve privacy, latency, and sustainability. Testing of the proposed architecture demonstrates that computations can be successfully offloaded, with acceptable latency, and minimal increase to the individual power use of the connected IoT devices.