Software-Defined Elastic Provisioning of IoT Edge Computing Virtual Resources

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.