Evaluating container-based virtualization overhead on the general-purpose IoT platform

Abstract

Virtualization has become a key technology that provides several advantages (e.g., flexibility, migration, isolation) for a plethora of computing infrastructures. However, traditional virtualization models are not suitable for embedded IoT platforms due to the virtualization layer verhead. New virtualization proposals such as container-based approaches arise as an option where performance is not impacted. However, when working on general-purpose embedded platforms, some studies have demonstrated that applications on container-based virtualization on embedded devices present considerable performance overhead. Since most performance evaluations on platforms using containers were run on servers, this study expands the testbed scenario by analyzing several metrics that measure the overhead of container-based virtualization layer on embedded IoT devices. Results demonstrated improvements up to 23% in terms of performance and up to 32% in terms of EDP.