Coded Cooperative Computation for Internet of Things

Cooperative computation is a promising approach for localized data processing for Internet of Things (IoT), where computationally intensive tasks in a device could be divided into sub-tasks, and offloaded to other devices or servers in close proximity. However, exploiting the potential of cooperative computation is challenging mainly due to the heterogeneous nature of IoT devices. Indeed, IoT devices may have different and time-varying computing power and energy resources, and could be mobile. Coded computation, which advocates mixing data in sub-tasks by employing erasure codes and offloading these sub-tasks to other devices for computation, is recently gaining interest, thanks to its higher reliability, smaller delay, and lower communication costs. In this paper, we develop a coded cooperative computation framework, which we name Computation Control Protocol (CCP), by taking into account heterogeneous computing power and energy resources of IoT devices. CCP dynamically allocates sub-tasks to helpers and is adaptive to time-varying resources. We show that (i) CCP improves task completion delay significantly as compared to baselines, (ii) task completion delay of CCP is very close to its theoretical characterization, and (iii) the efficiency of CCP in terms of resource utilization is higher than 99%, which is significant.