PerSoNet: Software-Defined Overlay Virtual Networks Spanning Personal Devices Across Social Network Users

New techniques are actively being researched to enable processing of information at the network's edge, closer to where data is generated. A nascent application enabled by such fog/edge computing model is that of community-based collaboration, where members pool personal resources together to accomplish a task, and data moves across edge resources. In such an environment, nodes that produce, store, and process data are often ephemeral, owned by different individuals, and distributed across multiple local networks. This poses new challenges at the network layer: how to automatically configure a network connecting distributed personal devices of social peers end-to-end, while enforcing privacy in communication among edge devices? We present PerSoNet, a novel virtual private network (VPN) that 1) automatically creates and manages private, authenticated overlay links across personal devices of social network peers, and 2) automatically manages software-defined networking (SDN) rules in software switches for packet forwarding, name resolution and mapping (for IP addresses and DNS names), and device network access control. PerSoNet abstracts away complexities, self-organizing a VPN that exposes IP/Ethernet network semantics, thereby enabling existing applications and middleware to be used in community-based fog/edge systems. In this work we describe the PerSoNet design and a prototype implementation based on SDN/OpenFlow and an open-source overlay. A prototype smart-task overlay application has also been built on top of PerSoNet to demonstrate its applicability and to evaluate key performance metrics of the system.