Role and Impact of Softwarization of Networks and Network functions in Fog based IoT Application Architectures

The modern era of IoT has seen disruptive changes in the application architecture leveraging cloud based technologies. However, universally acceptable de facto standard/framework for IoT applications is yet to evolved. Lot of research is carried out in this area to propose a suitable architecture for IoT applications considering their dynamic, resource intensive, computational intensive, delay sensitive, error sensitive nature. Though many cloud based solutions have been proposed in literature, recently fog based solutions have started making breakthrough by rightly satisfying the latency and bandwidth constraints of IoT applications. Softwarization has a major role to play in the implementation of fog based architectures for IoT applications. The Softwarization majorly encompasses the networks and network functions to implement fogs. This paper presents a study on the existing solutions that make use of Softwarization of Networks and Network functions for implementing fog based architectures for IoT applications. Based on the literature survey carried out, this paper provides a list of important aspects, any fog based IoT architecture must address and also highlights the use cases of softwarization techniques such as SDN, NFV and Containerization w.r.t the aspects identified. A representative fog computing architecture that encompasses all the identified aspects has also been presented.