IoT Resiliency through Edge-located Container-based Virtualization and SDN

Abstract

Despite the falling cost of electronics, the adoption IoT systems in households (“smart homes”) is hampered by their strict reliance on stable and reliable Internet connection, which is not readily available in all places around the world. This reliance is greater still in sensor-actuator setups that are comprised of products from several manufacturers or ecosystems, since the packets have to traverse and be processed by different cloud-based servers. In this paper, we propose a resilient IoT system which enables household IoT systems to remain functional even in the absence of an Internet connection. The system utilizes container-based virtualization in locally hosting cloud server functionality and software-defined networking (SDN) in hiding the packet redirection and providing a seamless network experience for the IoT devices. The system was built and its performance profiled as it utilized different hardware for its container-based virtualization host.