An NFV-Based Service Framework for IoT Applications in Edge Computing Environments

Emerging Internet of Things (IoT) applications share the same characteristics of involving multiple processing components (i.e., function modules) and requiring a massive amount of data to be processed with low latency. To meet these needs, edge/fog computing has been proposed for next-generation mobile networks to migrate the computing from the cloud to the edge of the network. Thanks to the development of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), with which edge computing platform can virtualize function modules and deploy them on any edge devices to provide flexible services on the edge networks. However, such platform would need to deal with complicated function module calling relationship (i.e., call graph) of applications and user mobility, and both are not thoroughly considered by existing works of NFV and edge computing. In this paper, based on our previous idea of virtual local-hub (VLH), we propose a complete design of edge computing framework, which applies NFV technology on edge computing environment for IoT applications. To handle the complicated call graphs of IoT applications with better resource utilization, the VLH framework adapts the technologies of container-based virtualization and microservice architecture, which enables remote function module sharing on the edge computing environment. The framework includes the heuristic algorithm for function module allocation with the objective of minimizing total bandwidth consumption. We also present a design of protocols for system operations and mobility handling in the framework. Then we implement the framework on commodity hardware as a testbed. Via simulations under a large-scale environment with practical settings and experiments on the testbed under real-world scenarios, we demonstrate and verify the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed VLH framework for IoT application service provision.