Software-Defined Elastic Provisioning of IoT Edge Computing Virtual Resources

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel SDN-based management system for elastic, on-demand activation of IoT fog computing resources at the network edge, utilizing containerization and sensor virtualization.

Contribution

It introduces a new management framework combining SDN, containerization, and virtualization for dynamic IoT edge resource provisioning.

Findings

Successful deployment of activation policies for edge containers within the same network domain.

Validation of the proposed solution through a dedicated testbed.

Effective handling of different application scenarios at the network edge.

Abstract

The fast growth of Internet-connected embedded devices demands for new capabilities at the network edge. These new capabilities are local processing, efficient communications, and resource virtualization. The current work aims to address these capabilities by designing and deploying a new management proposal, which offers on-demand activation of offline Internet of Things (IoT) fog computing assets via a Software Defined Networking (SDN) based solution combined with containerization and sensor virtualization. We propose a testbed as a proof of concept for the main functionalities of this novel solution. The obtained results evidence that the current SDN-based solution can deploy with success activation policies on computational edge containers, which are located within the same network domain of the SDN controller. In addition, different application-level scenarios are also investigated.