Allocation of Heterogeneous Resources of an IoT Device to Flexible Services

Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices can be equipped with multiple heterogeneous network interfaces. An overwhelmingly large amount of services may demand some or all of these interfaces' available resources. Herein, we present a precise mathematical formulation of assigning services to interfaces with heterogeneous resources in one or more rounds. For reasonable instance sizes, the presented formulation produces optimal solutions for this computationally hard problem. We prove the NP-completeness of the problem and develop two algorithms to approximate the optimal solution for big instance sizes. The first algorithm allocates the most demanding service requirements first, considering the average cost of interfaces' resources. The second one calculates the demanding resource shares and allocates the most demanding of them first by choosing randomly among equally demanding shares. Finally, we provide simulation results giving insight into services splitting over different interfaces for both cases.