Distributed Data Flow Scheduling Optimization in Industrial Internet of Things Based on Optimal Transport Theory

The development of Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has completely changed the traditional manufacturing industry. The data exchange between controllers and actuators needs to achieve extremely low delay in IIoT. Due to the limited communication resources, it is necessary to reasonably schedule data flow to reduce delay. Although the studies of data flow scheduling exist in IIoT, they have not considered the impact of time-varying environmental factors and most of them adopted centralized scheduling schemes, which increase computation and communication cost rapidly in large-scale network scenarios. In this article, the consensus-based distributed optimal transport (OT) algorithm is proposed to optimize data flow scheduling for IIoT networks. Specifically, a data flow scheduling optimization mechanism based on time-varying environmental factors is proposed and an online distributed data flow scheduling optimization algorithm is designed. Compared with the random data flow scheduling algorithm, numerical results show that the proposed algorithm can maximally reduce the average delay by 87%, increase the transmission rate and the spectral efficiency by 157% and 98%, respectively.