Design of scalable directory service for future IoT applications

Abstract

Unprecedentedly a massive number of devices are getting connected in the coming era of the Internet of Things (IoT). For discovery, remote access and management of these IoT devices, an IoT directory service is needed to store and provide their various attributes such as location, generated data types, owner's name, and security keys. In this paper, we present the architectural design of the IoT directory service that is capable to store a huge number of heterogeneous records and provide fast lookup (latency of few milliseconds) and dynamic update (latency of few seconds), while fully complying with owner- or user-centric security and privacy policy. To meet the performance requirements despite fluctuations in the workload and networking environment, we leverage tools of network function and resource virtualization to dynamically allocate and adjust the computational and network resources assigned to the directory service.