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Top1. Introduction
The Internet has changed our world and brought with it many technical, economic, and social benefits by connecting people. It is expected that the Internet of Things will create enormous value by interconnecting people and everyday things toward a green IoT environment where people are provided with not only smart but also environmental IoT services (Solanki & Nayyar, 2019). In fact, IoT has already enabled many emerging applications and services critical to our life in various domains from personal healthcare to critical infrastructures, and large-scale systems as smart cities (Krishnamurthi, Nayyar, & Solanki, 2019). However, this enormous potential is limited by existing IoT systems/platforms, which are mainly closed ecosystems that are vertically developed and deployed in their own IoT infrastructure and have incompatible standards, formats, semantics, and proprietary protocol and interfaces (Do, Le, Paul Lin, & Tung, 2019). Security concern also prevents the sharing of IoT resources among IoT applications (Jain, Jain, & Nayyar, 2020; Nayyar, Jain, Mahapatra, & Singh, 2019). As a consequence, a number of major issues have been identified with the current generation IoT systems/platforms:
The vast number of devices and connectivity-service infrastructure. As projected, there would be about 41.6 billion IoT devices in 2025 (Framingham, 2019). The challenge here is how to manage the complexity of the interconnecting infrastructure and to serve both local communities and geographically distributed communities covering a large or global community effectively. This also poses a challenge to application management when a thousand of IoT devices are under the management of an application network (Ramachandran & Krishnamachari, 2019).
The huge number of IoT services and service provisioning. IoT devices are capable of interacting with their environment, performing some basic functionality as well as connecting with others. A huge number of services have already emerged to take advantage of these capabilities, and the challenge is to automate the provision of services on demand.
The massive amount of resources and resource sharing. Collectively, through interconnectivity, IoTs present a massive amount of available resources and services to be shared. The challenge is in the developing of algorithms and supporting infrastructure for sharing and reusing resources.
In order to address these challenging issues, we investigate technologies, network architectures, device capabilities, protocols, and programmable mechanisms for orchestrating services on demand.
On connectivity and networking architecture. Software-Defined Networking (SDN) enables network programmability and fine-grained flow-based automated management that are not available with traditional distributed networks. Through the logically centralized knowledge of the whole network, an SDN controller can configure network devices automatically to deal with network dynamics. Many networks are currently being deployed for these purposes (Habibi, Baharlooei, Farhoudi, Kazemian, & Khorsandi, 2018). IoT-programmability, however, is still far from expectation. We innovate the Software-Defined Networking concept for the IoT domain and investigate a large-scale architecture spanning both the SDN domain and IoT domain for end-to-end applications in the manufacturing industry.
On device capability. The highly resource-constrained nature of IoT devices regarding energy, computing power, storage, and wireless connectivity prevents a direct application of the wired SDN technique to the IoT world. Efforts have been attempted to address this issue; systematically enriching devices with resource sharing capability remain open challenges (Do et al., 2019). We investigate the virtualization technology to enhance and supplement the programmability of physical devices.
On communication and management protocol. Sensors/IoT devices are not network routing devices, and heavy protocols for programming network flows in network devices are not applicable to IoT devices. Efforts have been made to address this management issue with limited success. We investigate simple protocols for porting the SDN paradigm to IoT networks to compensate for the nature of IoT devices.