Dynamic M2M device attachment and redirection in virtual home gateway environments
Apostolos S. Papageorgiou, Roberto Bifulco, Ernő Kovács, Hans-Jorg Kolbe · 2016
Virtualized access to M2M (Machine-to-Machine) devices can offer to operators various benefits in terms of hardware and management costs. However, it is often impeded by the inability to efficiently handle the traffic from the devices towards servers that are appropriate to serve as virtual hosts for the given devices. In this paper we present a solution which can be applied in a virtual Home Gateway environment and is based on (i) encoding information about the device and its virtualization technology into TCP/IP packet headers, (ii) selecting virtual hosts based on their compatibility to certain virtualization technologies, and (iii) using Software-defined Networking to make this virtual host selection at the network level in a dynamic manner. Compared to the main alternatives, which are based either on Deep Packet Inspection or on homogeneous servers, our solution is the only one that combines a tailored and non-costly server infrastructure with low networking complexity.