An Infrastructure as a Service for the Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) enables a plethora of applications. However provisioning these applications in a cost-efficient manner, as well as decoupling the applications from the underlying IoT devices remains a challenge that cloud computing may aid in tackling. This paper proposes an architecture for an IoT Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) to address these issues. Like any other cloud IaaS, the proposed IaaS relies on virtualization to realize cost efficiency. The high-level Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that enable IoT cloud consumers (e.g. IoT PaaS) to use the virtualized resources are described, as well as the lower level APIs that make possible the management of the actual pool of IoT physical resources. The subjacent functional entities (e.g. orchestrator, publisher, repository access engine, physical and virtual sensor repositories) are introduced, as well as the related interfaces. A proof of concept prototype is built and performance measurements are made. Advanticsys and Virtenio sensors are used as physical sensors.