A Performance Evaluation of Linux Containers on Similar Arm Based Internet of Things Development Boards

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is evolving and there will be more than 50 billion connected things in the near future. Security is of prime importance when so many devices are connected and it is an active research topic among others, in the IoT world. We need innovative ways to deploy, manage and update the software installed on these devices in order to keep the devices updated with security fixes delivered on time. Containers can help in achieving a new mechanism to deploy and apply updates to these IoT devices, which many System on a chip (SoC) vendors and other operating system vendors handling IoT devices are considering. There are many ARM based development boards available commercially off-the-shelf offering various hardware specifications. In this paper we will use Linux containers on ARM based development boards such as Dragonboard 410c, Orange Pi PC2, Pine A64 and Raspberry Pi 3 model B which are commonly used in IoT development, in order to benchmark and measure their performance at various levels.