Enabling service-centric networks for cloudlets using SDN

The current developments in smart devices, wearable gadgets and IoT (Internet-of-Things) are triggering a variety of novel use cases and services. Once the technology matures, a wide range of services is expected to be provided at the edge of the network in coordination with the cloud computing infrastructure. These services will be highly dynamic meaning that they can be served from edge computing facilities and from central cloud servers being transferred back and forth. Also, considering the mobility of the users and the varying demand, those services might need to be live migrated between nearby edge servers on-the-fly. This setup creates an environment that needs to be transparent to the end users. The current legacy networking paradigm, however, allow services to be reached by IP and port addresses, not by their content. Alternatively, in the service-centric approach the services themselves are handled independent of their location and the focus shifts to “what ” instead of “where ”. Due to the complexities involved, it is not a straightforward task to establish service-centricity at the edge scenarios. As a remedy, this paper proposes a service-centric approach at the edge servers using orchestration capabilities offered by the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technology. To demonstrate how SDN can help to alleviate the problem, an emulation environment is used in which northbound applications are implemented in order to setup the service-centric structure. The effect of service-centric approach is shown with the load balancing experiments where the performance of the proposed system is evaluated for various use cases.