Enabling Data Processing at the Network Edge through Lightweight Virtualization Technologies

Cloud computing plays a crucial role in making Internet of Things (IoT) becoming a central part of future industries, society and people's life. However, the increase of the number of devices connected to the different networks, the huge amount of data produced by them, and the advanced requirements of many IoT applications, has resulted in new technical challenges. This has lead to the introduction of an edge-computing approach, which is intended to make the management of such networks more efficient. The paradigm aims to move part of the data processing operations close to the data sources. Such operations are performed by means of network entities - like IoT gateways or local servers - near the IoT device. In this paper, we describe the design of a multifunctional IoT gateway that, making use of lightweight virtualization technologies such as Docker containers, allows managing different services, including data processing services, so as to enable the migration towards the edge based approach. Furthermore, we show how the introduction of container-based technologies can bring several benefits without impacting the gateway performance.