Virtual Resources & Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) systems mostly follow a Cloud-centric approach. These systems get the benefits of the extensive computational capabilities and flexibility of the Cloud. Although Cloud-centric systems support virtualization of components to interact with IoT networks, many of these systems introduce high latency and restrict direct access to IoT devices. Fog computing has been presented as an alternative to reduce latency when engaging IoT networks, however, new forms of virtualization are required to access physical devices in a direct manner. This research introduces a definition of Virtual Resources to enable direct access to IoT networks and to allow richer interactions between applications and IoT components. Additionally, this work proposes Virtual Resources as a mechanism to handle the multi-tenancy challenge that emerges when more than one tenant tries to access and manipulate an IoT component simultaneously. Virtual Resources are developed using Go language and CoAP protocol. This work proposes permission-based blockchain to provision Virtual Resources directly on IoT devices. Seven experiments have been done using Raspberry Pi computers and Edison Arduino boards to test the definition of Virtual Resources presented by this work. The results of the experiments demonstrate that Virtual Resources can be deployed across different IoT platforms. Also, the results show that Virtual Resources and blockchain can support multi-tenancy in the IoT space. IBM Bluemix Blockchain as a Service and Multichain blockchain have been evaluated handling the provisioning of Virtual Resources in the IoT network. The results of these experiments show that permission-based blockchain can store the configurations of Virtual Resources and provision these configurations in the IoT network.