ThingVisor factory: thing virtualization platform for things as a service

In order to provide interoperability of cross-domain IoT applications involving different IoT platforms, the authors previously proposed a virtual IoT system called VirIoT. The proposed system is composed of two functionalities: ThingVisor and vSilo, and it aims at decoupling IoT device providers and IoT application developers. ThingVisor enables to produce virtual IoT devices, or Virtual Things, from physical IoT devices for sharing the physical devices among cross-domain IoT applications. In addition, vSilo enables to bridge between such Virtual Things and IoT applications for the interoperability of cross-domain IoT devices. In this paper, in order to enhance the VirIoT system, we propose ThingVisor Factory that helps to design ThingVisors in a user-friendly way and deploy them on demand autonomously by following container orchestration methodologies, such as Kubernetes. ThingVisor Factory is based on two concepts: dataflow programming-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) and service function chaining-based ThingVisor development.