A study on container virtualization for guarantee quality of service in Cloud-of-Things

Abstract Internet of Things (IoT) Cloud is emerging as an innovative distributed system consisting of a set of Single Board Computers (SBCs), smart phones and any other kind of smart devices interconnected to a Cloud system through the Internet. It offers IoT as a Service (IoTaaS) consisting of one or more micro-services deployed on smart devices. Typically, Cloud-of-Things (CoT) allows to move services from the Cloud to these IoT devices in real-time. In this context, the container virtualization is a lightweight solution that can be adopted in IoT devices, for enhancing service provisioning, setup, and management of micro-services in order to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS). In this paper, we analyse the overhead introduced by container virtualization when multiple concurrent containarized micro-services are executed in parallel within the same IoT device in order to optimize both virtual sensing and actuating resources. Experiments proves that the introduced overhead is acceptable considering the obvious advantages brought by the adoption of container virtualization in terms of resources partitioning.