CliMBOS: A Modular NFV Cloud Backend for the Internet of Things

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT) as an increasingly pervasive influx of connected devices into people's everyday lives calls for an appropriate level of support by the network. Considering societal issues related to the data produced by IoT devices such as privacy and data ownership, together with technical issues of confidentiality, isolation, and scalability of the IoT server infrastructure, we observe that the present cloud computing model based on large-scale consolidated databases and services may not be universally applicable. In this paper we make a case for supporting IoT backends via network function virtualization (NFV) as a way to better align user privacy needs with the strong technical guarantees that purpose-built virtualized network functions can provide.