Container Based Resource Management for Data Processing on IoT Gateways
Ahmed Bali, Billel Seghir, Mahmud Al-Osta, Abdelouahed Gherbi · Procedia Computer Science · 2019
IoT is featured by its diversity and heterogeneity in terms of hardware and software components shaping its systems. This in turn burdens the process of deploying and updating hardware components and their corresponding software elements. Moreover, these devices are constantly generating data and sending them to central cloud platforms for advanced processing, with billions of devices are anticipated to be connected in the coming years, this will lead to impact the network performance. To alleviate this concern, a recent tendency is to process these data locally close to their sources at the network edge. However, edge devices are likely to be resource-constrained, which in some cases limits their abilities to perform processing tasks. This work falls within the efforts attempt to provide a solution to enable an effective management of resources at the edge devices, as well as, facilitating the deployment and update of heterogeneous software modules. The proposed solution relies on containers, a lightweight virtualization technology. It takes advantage of some containers concepts, especially the orchestration concept, to enable task forwarding and resource sharing between IoT gateway devices within the same cluster. Our experimentation has shown promising results and revealed the potential of existing virtualization platforms.