IoT Services and Virtual Objects Management in Hyperconnected Things Network

Abstract

In recent past, Internet of Things- (IoT-) based applications have experienced tremendous growth in various domains, and billions of devices are expected to be connected to the Internet in near future. The first step for development of IoT-based applications is to virtualize the physical devices by abstracting device properties in virtual objects. Later, these virtual objects can be combined to compose different services for diverse applications. Many existing systems provide virtualization service for physical devices and service composition. But, with the growth of the network, when too many devices and services are added in the IoT network, its management will become a cumbersome task. This paper presents an architecture of IoT services and virtual objects management in hyperconnected things network to facilitate the management tasks. We also have implemented a Service and Virtual Objects Management (SVOM) system prototype to effectively organize and monitor the physical devices through corresponding virtual objects and services composed in the IoT environment. The proposed system also provides interface for user interaction to perform supported control operations on selected device and check device operational and fault status. For scalability analysis of the proposed system, we have performed simulation in the OMNeT++ simulator to study impact of the IoT network size on key performance measures like response time, throughput, and packet delivery ratio. Simulation results reveal that with the growing network size, the gateway nodes become the performance bottleneck. We have also performed resources requirement analysis for virtual objects and control overhead analysis of the proposed management system. Simulation results reveal that control overhead is insignificant in normal scenarios; however, in extreme network conditions, we may have to sacrifice fewer bits which is, in fact, worth nothing when compared to the flexibility and control offered by the proposed management system.