EdgeUP: Utilization and Priority-Aware Load Balancing in Edge Computing

This paper introduces a dynamic context-aware load balancing mechanism called EdgeUP, which leverages dynamic contexts of both edge nodes and IoT devices to balance tasks on edge nodes optimally. To perform this, we devised a lightweight load balancer to allocate tasks optimally based on CPU utilization across edge nodes while satisfying the task priority of IoT devices. We implemented EdgeUP on real edge devices (i.e., Raspberry Pi 400) and evaluated it in terms of the average CPU utilization of edge nodes, idle CPU distance, and execution time. The experimental results show that EdgeUP outperforms three conventional load balancing algorithms, including round-robin, hill climbing, and K-Means, by 5.6×, 2.1×, and 3.6×, respectively.