Serverless computing for the Internet of Things

Abstract

Cloud-based services have evolved significantly over the years. Cloud computing models such as IaaS, PaaS and SaaS are serving as an alternative to traditional in-house infrastructure-based approach. Furthermore, serverless computing is a cloud computing model for ephemeral, stateless and event-driven applications that scale up and down instantly. In contrast to the infinite resources of cloud computing, the Internet of Things is the network of resource-constrained, heterogeneous and intelligent devices that generate a significant amount of data. Due to the resource-constrained nature of IoT devices, cloud resources are used to process data generated by IoT devices. However, data processing in the cloud also has few limitations such as latency and privacy concerns. These limitations arise a requirement of local processing of data generated by IoT devices. A serverless platform can be deployed on a cluster of IoT devices using software containers to enable local processing of the sensor data. This work proposes a hybrid multi-layered architecture that not only establishes the possibility of local processing of sensor data but also considers the issues such as heterogeneity, resource constraint nature of IoT devices. We use software containers, and multi-layered architecture to provide the high availability and fault tolerance in our proposed solution.