An agile and effective network function virtualization infrastructure for the Internet of Things

The processing and power-consumption constraints of the Internet of Things devices hinder them to offer more complex network services than the simple data transmission in smart city scenarios. The lack of complex services, such as security and quality of service, can even foster disasters in urban centers. In this paper, we propose the integration of complex network services from the IoT devices till a cloud environment through an agile and effective network function virtualization infrastructure of isolated IoT domains. Therefore, our proposal develops a simple gateway access node that virtualizes the domains to which the devices connect. A prototype for services of security and quality of service has been implemented and its evaluation shows that virtualization of the access node does not impact the performance of virtual network functions. The results also show that the proposal provides security for IoT devices, identifying malicious traffic with 99.8% accuracy, avoiding denial of essential services, and ensuring the quality of service.