Wireless sensor networks have wide applications in monitoring applications. However, sensors' energy and processing power constraints, as well as the limited network bandwidth, constitute significant obstacles to near-real-time requirements of modern IoT applications. Offloading sensor data on an edge computing infrastructure instead of in-cloud or in-network processing is a promising solution to these issues. Nevertheless, due to (1) geographical dispersion, (2) ad-hoc deployment and (3) rudimentary support systems compared to cloud data centers, reliability is a critical issue. This forces edge service providers to deploy a huge amount of edge nodes over an urban area, with catastrophic effects on environmental sustainability. In this work, we propose ARES, a two-stage optimization algorithm for sustainable and reliable deployment of edge nodes in an urban area. Initially, ARES applies multi-objective optimization to identify a set of Pareto-optimal solutions for transmission time and energy; then it augments these candidates in the second stage to identify a solution that guarantees the desired level of reliability using a dynamic Bayesian network based reliability model. ARES is evaluated through simulations using data from the urban area of Vienna. Results demonstrate that it can achieve a better trade-off between transmission time, energy-efficiency and reliability than the state-of-the-art solutions.

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