A Cloud Infrastructure as a Service for an Efficient Usage of Sensing and Actuation Capabilities in Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) applications are becoming more and more pervasive. However, they are usually embedded in the actual IoT devices. This precludes the efficient usage of IoT capabilities, particularly, sensing and actuation capabilities. Cloud computing enables the efficient usage of resources through the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) service model. Unfortunately, an IoT IaaS faces many challenges that the research community has not yet solved. Some examples are the heterogeneity of the devices, their orchestration, and the provision of bare-metal access. This paper proposes an architecture for a cloud IaaS in IoT settings. Modules, interfaces, and procedures are proposed. The validation is done by a proof of concept, with concrete measurements on the prototype and simulations. The prototype relies on real-life sensors (i.e., Virtenio and Advanticsys) and robots (i.e., EV3 LEGO Mindstorms).