Novel Models and Techniques for Software-defined IoT Cloud Systems

Provisioning and Governance of Software-defined IoT Cloudsystems

Cloud computing is ever stronger converging with IoT offering novel techniques for IoT infrastructure virtualization and its management on the cloud. However, system designers and operations managers face numerous challenges to realize IoT cloud systems in practice, due to the complexities involved with provisioning large-scale IoT cloud systems and diversity of their requirements in terms of IoT resources consumption, customiza- tion of IoT capabilities and runtime governance. In this paper, we introduce the concept of software-defined IoT units – a novel approach to IoT cloud computing that encapsulates fine-grained IoT resources and IoT capabilities in a well-defined API in order to provide a unified view on accessing, configuring and operating IoT cloud systems. Our software-defined IoT units are the fundamental building blocks of software-defined IoT systems. We present our framework for dynamic, on-demand provisioning and deploying such software-defined IoT systems in the cloud. By automating main provisioning aspects and providing support for managed configurations, our framework simplifies provisioning of software-defined IoT systems and enables flexible runtime customizations. We demonstrate its advantages on a real-world IoT cloud system for managing electric fleet vehicles.