Project UNITED

Abstract

With billions of IoT devices deployed in the near future, scalability, security, availability, and flexibility to changing environments will become an issue. Cloud computing and Software Defined Networking (SDN) are expected to tackle some of these limitations. Furthermore, recent advancements in Distributed Computing enable services such as computing done on the network edge, close to the end-user, thus helping with the latency and bandwidth constraints. However, these features need to be further studied and improved in order to reach their full potential. The convergence of light-weight IoT virtualization with the SDN architecture will allow efficient handling and processing of IoT traffic throughout the network. Virtualization of IoT functions together with Distributed Computing and SDN will enable efficient and flexible processing of IoT data as well as rich and novel services offering.

This will affect the whole value chain from application developers to service providers and network operators and ultimately to end users. For service providers, this offers an easier way of launching new dynamic service concepts and life cycle service orchestration. At the same time, it enables customers to more easily provision and manage themselves the services and products in their use. For IoT application programmers, IoT virtualization enables simplified and faster development of new and reusable applications by abstracting the complexity of underlying HW and its management.

The project will build upon key enabling technologies including SDN, Distributed Cloud Computing, and light-weight virtualization architectures. It aims at evaluating, developing, and validating the most feasible IoT function virtualization solutions. In addition, the project will study and develop mechanisms for the management and orchestration of the converged virtualized infrastructure and services. The validation of the developed concepts is experimented through several use cases addressing important application areas with requirements such as high reliability, ultra-low latency, and scalability.