EdgeIoT: Mobile Edge Computing for the Internet of Things

Abstract

In order to overcome the scalability problem of the traditional Internet of Things architecture (i.e., data streams generated from distributed IoT devices are transmitted to the remote cloud via the Internet for further analysis), this article proposes a novel approach to mobile edge computing for the IoT architecture, edgeIoT, to handle the data streams at the mobile edge. Specifically, each BS is connected to a fog node, which provides computing resources locally. On the top of the fog nodes, the SDN-based cellular core is designed to facilitate packet forwarding among fog nodes. Meanwhile, we propose a hierarchical fog computing architecture in each fog node to provide flexible IoT services while maintaining user privacy: each user's IoT devices are associated with a proxy VM (located in a fog node), which collects, classifies, and analyzes the devices' raw data streams, converts them into metadata, and transmits the metadata to the corresponding application VMs (which are owned by IoT service providers). Each application VM receives the corresponding metadata from different proxy VMs and provides its service to users. In addition, a novel proxy VM migration scheme is proposed to minimize the traffic in the SDNbased core.