Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) refers to things such as sensors and actuators interacting with each other to reach common goals. It enables multiple applications in sectors ranging from agriculture to health. Nowadays, applications and IoT infrastructure are tightly coupled and this may lead to the deployment of redundant IoT infrastructures, thus, cost inefficiency.

Cloud computing can help in tackling the problem. It is a paradigm to quickly
provision configured resources (computing, network, memory) on demand for cost efficiency. It has three layers, the infrastructure as a service (IaaS), the platform as a service (PaaS) and the software as a service (SaaS). Through the IaaS, configured hardware resources (CPU, storage, etc.) are provisioned on demand. However, designing and implementing an IoT IaaS architecture for the provisioning of IoT resource on demand remains very challenging. An example of a challenge is using the appropriate publishing and discovery mechanism suitable for IoT devices. Orchestrating a virtualized IoT device over several physical IoT devices is another challenge that needs to be addressed.

The main contribution of this thesis is twofold. First, a novel IoT IaaS architecture is proposed where IoT devices can be provisioned as a configured infrastructure resource on demand via node virtualization. Second, the architecture is prototyped and evaluated using real-life sensors that support node virtualization. Node level virtualization achieves resource efficiency in contrast to middleware solutions. The essential architectural features, such as publication, discovery, and orchestration are identified and proposed. Two sets of a high-level interface are also introduced. A low-level uniform interface is suggested to decouple the IoT devices from the applications by allowing the applications to access the heterogeneous devices in a uniform way. In addition, a cloud management interface is proposed to expose the IoT IaaS to the cloud consumers (for example - the PaaS, the application, etc.) and allow them to provision the IoT resources.

By allowing the capability sharing of the IoT devices using the node virtualization, the cost efficiency and energy efficiency are achieved in the proposed architecture. Addressing other challenges allowed the proposed architecture to expose the IoT devices to the IaaS in a more abstract manner. Thus allowing the application to provision the IoT resources on demand as well as handling the IoT device heterogeneity in the IaaS.