Internet of Things connectivity with gateway functionality virtualization

Abstract

The Internet of Things is among the most prominent emerging technologies of today and the future. A lot of effort has been put into researching and designing small devices that are able to communicate with the Internet. More and more new products are coming to the market all the time. This paper focuses on the IoT connectivity issues by designing and evaluating an IoT gateway, which utilizes functionality virtualization techniques. The role of the gateway is to allow Internet access for end devices that are not able to implement the full Internet protocol stack. Gateway functionality virtualization, on the other hand, makes it easier to make software updates, run and stop functionalities, and add and remove features, such as support for a new protocol, on the fly. The gateway architecture supports edge computing, which aims to process data at the network edge instead of doing everything in the cloud. The paper discusses lightweight virtualization techniques, implementation of gateway architecture and some of the real usage scenarios. Finally, the implemented gateway is evaluated in a real world scenario.