Experiences from Building a Multi-Access Edge Computing Internet of Things Testbed

Smart applications enabled through Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and other fast growing technologies are forming a new market for all industries. As this new era of smart technologies is exciting, it can also can be daunting considering the huge amount of new software, hardware and networking concepts. A solution to adjust smoothly to the new era is experimenting over a testbed in order to learn, test and assess the feasibility of new applications. This paper is documenting the experiences and results of building an IoT testbed with an edge computing orientation. The testbed is designed to be adaptable to heterogeneity of devices, and deploy micro-services that are running "close" to the users. We present our software architecture for service orchestration, IoT data management and edge node management. The challenges of constructing a testbed outdoors in the city center of Bristol (United Kingdom) and our approach to solutions are thoroughly reported in this paper, aiming to contribute our lessons learned.