Cloud4IoT: A Heterogeneous, Distributed and Autonomic Cloud Platform for the IoT

Abstract

We introduce Cloud4IoT, a platform offering automatic deployment, orchestration and dynamic configuration of IoT support software components and data-intensive applications for data processing and analytics, thus enabling plug-andplay integration of new sensor objects and dynamic workload scalability. Cloud4IoT enables the concept of Infrastructure as Code in the IoT context: it empowers IoT operations with the flexibility and elasticity of Cloud services. Furthermore it shifts traditionally centralized Cloud architectures towards a more distributed and decentralized computation paradigm, as required by IoT technologies, bridging the gap between Cloud Computing and IoT ecosystems. Thus, Cloud4IoT is playing a role similar to the one covered by solutions like Fog Computing, Cloudlets or Mobile Edge Cloud.The hierarchical architecture of Cloud4IoT hosts a central Cloud platform and multiple remote edge Cloud modules supporting dedicated devices, namely the IoT Gateways, through which new sensor objects are made accessible to the platform. Overall, the platform is designed in order to support systems where IoT-based and data intensive applications may pose specific requirements for low latency, restricted available bandwidth, or data locality.Cloud4IoT is built on several Open Source technologies for containerisation and implementations of standards, protocols and services for the IoT. We present the implementation of the platform and demonstrate it in two different use cases.

Internet‐of‐Things‐Infrastructure‐as‐a‐Service: The democratization of access to public Internet‐of‐Things Infrastructure

“…More recent approaches to integrating IoT edge devices more closely into cloud services include MDSLAB Messina's Stack4Things 10 by Merlino et al, 11 Longo et al, 12 Benomar et al, 13 and Cloud4IoT by Pizzoli et al 14 …”

“…Cloud4IoT 14 is a platform that adopts a hybrid approach to bridge the gap between the centralized nature of cloud computing architecture with the distributed nature of IoT system components. In essence, Cloud4IoT also employs the philosophy of edge computing by extending cloud services closer to the IoT devices, which are located at the periphery of the network.…”

Adaptive Trading of Cloud of Things Resources

“…The adaptability of CoT platforms is also studied. A platform to support adaptations in CoT deployments and configuration is introduced in [14]. The platform adapts to the relocation changes of IoT resources among IoT gateways.…”

IoT Data Analytics as a Network Edge Service

“…To leverage the bottleneck, scalability, and reliability issues mentioned above, in this demo we implement a local cloud infrastructure based on open source software, as shown in Figure 1. It enables embedded intelligence at the level of IoT gateways, like in [2], but with the added reliability provided by a Kubernetes cluster for Docker containers [3], which is able to replicate software throughout the local cloud and ensure rolling updates that yield virtually zero downtime. Furthermore, to ensure security and reduction of south-north traffic, pre-processing and caching using persistent volumes are enabled at IoT gateways.…”