SINC - An Information-Centric Approach for End-to-End IoT Cloud Resource Provisioning

Abstract

The explosive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) has raised the need foreffective provisioning and management of resources in an IoT-based system. By resource we mean any entity (physical or virtual) that makes up the IoTsystem, such as sensors, gateways, network elements, and cloud data stores. Typical user requests for resource provisioning demand end-to-end slices ofan IoT system, and these requests are also dynamic and constantly changing. Meeting such requests using today's approaches is a time-consuming processsince such end-to-end slices need to be hardwired together due to the lackof information-centric frameworks to aggregate and control diverse types ofresources from IoT, network functions and cloud infrastructures. To that end, in this conceptual paper, we propose an information-centricapproach towards IoT resources provisioning and management. By virtualizing access to underlying IoT resources and leveraging APIs to manipulatethose resources, our approach proposes techniques to enable IoT systemdesigners to automate resource provisioning and management for users acrossIoT, network functions and clouds. In doing so, our approach focuses on novelconcepts to create and manage end-to-end slices of diverse types of resourcesfrom different, distributed infrastructures. In this paper we present SINC -- Slicing IoT, Network Functions, and Clouds -- which enables designers todynamically create/update end-to-end slices of the overall IoT network inorder to simultaneously meet multiple user needs. We describe SINC layersand components and also outline our approach to an implementation of SINC.