An Envisioned Virtual Gateway Architecture for Capillary Networks in Smart Cities

Capillary networks are regarded as essential compliments to cellular networks for future smart city applications. Gateways play a critical role to interconnect capillary networks with the Internet. However, traditional purpose-built hardware based gateways are not flexible enough to accommodate the emerging diverse radio access technologies and satisfy the ever-increasing networking demands. To tackle this issue, we explore the recently emerging software defined networking and network function virtualization techniques and propose a virtual gateway concept for capillary network in this paper.