Detti Andrea, Nakazato Hidenori, Martínez Navarro Juan Antonio, Tropea Giuseppe, Funari Ludovico, Petrucci Luca, Sánchez Segado Juan Andrés, Kanai Kenji
CNIT-Electronic Engineering Department, University of Rome "Tor Vergata", 00133 Rome, Italy.
Department of Communications and Computer Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo 169-0072, Japan.
Sensors (Basel). 2021 Sep 30;21(19):6546. doi: 10.3390/s21196546.
Many cloud providers offer IoT services that simplify the collection and processing of IoT information. However, the IoT infrastructure composed of sensors and actuators that produces this information remains outside the cloud; therefore, application developers must install, connect and manage the cloud. This requirement can be a market barrier, especially for small/medium software companies that cannot afford the infrastructural costs associated with it and would only prefer to focus on IoT application developments. Motivated by the wish to eliminate this barrier, this paper proposes a platform, called VirIoT, which fully brings the Infrastructure as a service model typical of cloud computing to the world of Internet of Things. VirIoT provides users with virtual IoT infrastructures (Virtual Silos) composed of virtual things, with which users can interact through dedicated and standardized broker servers in which the technology can be chosen among those offered by the platform, such as oneM2M, NGSI and NGSI-LD. VirIoT allows developers to focus their efforts exclusively on IoT applications without worrying about infrastructure management and allows cloud providers to expand their IoT services portfolio. VirIoT uses external things and cloud/edge computing resources to deliver the IoT virtualization services. Its open-source architecture is microservice-based and runs on top of a distributed Kubernetes platform with nodes in central and edge data centers. The architecture is scalable, efficient and able to support the continuous integration of heterogeneous things and IoT standards, taking care of interoperability issues. Using a VirIoT deployment spanning data centers in Europe and Japan, we conducted a performance evaluation with a two-fold objective: showing the efficiency and scalability of the architecture; and leveraging VirIoT's ability to integrate different IoT standards in order to make a fair comparison of some open-source IoT Broker implementations, namely Mobius for oneM2M, Orion for NGSIv2, Orion-LD and Scorpio for NGSI-LD.
许多云提供商提供物联网服务，这些服务简化了物联网信息的收集和处理。然而，产生这些信息的由传感器和执行器组成的物联网基础设施仍处于云之外；因此，应用程序开发人员必须安装、连接和管理云。这一要求可能成为市场障碍，尤其是对于那些负担不起与之相关的基础设施成本且只想专注于物联网应用开发的中小型软件公司而言。出于消除这一障碍的愿望，本文提出了一个名为VirIoT的平台，该平台将云计算典型的基础设施即服务模型全面引入物联网领域。VirIoT为用户提供由虚拟事物组成的虚拟物联网基础设施（虚拟筒仓），用户可以通过专用的标准化代理服务器与这些虚拟事物进行交互，在这些代理服务器中可以从平台提供的技术中进行选择，如oneM2M、NGSI和NGSI-LD。VirIoT使开发人员能够将精力完全集中在物联网应用上，而不必担心基础设施管理，同时也使云提供商能够扩展其物联网服务组合。VirIoT利用外部事物以及云/边缘计算资源来提供物联网虚拟化服务。其开源架构基于微服务，运行在分布式Kubernetes平台之上，该平台在中央和边缘数据中心都有节点。该架构具有可扩展性、高效性，能够支持异构事物和物联网标准的持续集成，同时解决互操作性问题。通过在欧洲和日本的数据中心进行VirIoT部署，我们进行了一项性能评估，目标有两个：展示该架构的效率和可扩展性；利用VirIoT集成不同物联网标准的能力，以便对一些开源物联网代理实现进行公平比较，即用于oneM2M的Mobius、用于NGSIv2的Orion、用于NGSI-LD的Orion-LD和Scorpio。
