SINC - An Information-Centric Approach for End-to-End IoT Cloud Resource Provisioning

Abstract

The explosive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) has raised the need for effective provisioning and management of resources in an IoT-based system. By resource we mean any entity (physical or virtual) that makes up the IoT system, such as sensors, gateways, network elements, and cloud data stores. Typical user requests for resource provisioning demand end-to-end slices ofan IoT system, and these requests are also dynamic and constantly changing. Meeting such requests using today's approaches is a time-consuming process since such end-to-end slices need to be hardwired together due to the lackof information-centric frameworks to aggregate and control diverse types of resources from IoT, network functions and cloud infrastructures. To that end, in this conceptual paper, we propose an information-centric approach towards IoT resources provisioning and management. By virtualizing access to underlying IoT resources and leveraging APIs to manipulate those resources, our approach proposes techniques to enable IoT system designers to automate resource provisioning and management for users across IoT, network functions and clouds. In doing so, our approach focuses on novel concepts to create and manage end-to-end slices of diverse types of resources from different, distributed infrastructures. In this paper we present SINC -- Slicing IoT, Network Functions, and Clouds -- which enables designers todynamically create/update end-to-end slices of the overall IoT network in order to simultaneously meet multiple user needs. We describe SINC layersand components and also outline our approach to an implementation of SINC.