Cloud Based IoT Network Virtualization for Supporting Dynamic Connectivity among Connected Devices

Internet of Things (IoT) is considered one of the future disruptive technologies and has attracted lots of research attention in the recent past. IoT devices are tiny sensing or actuating devices attached to daily life objects, capable of sending sensing data and receiving commands. Cloud computing technology provides tremendous computing and storage capacity over the Internet to overcome limited resources of IoT devices. Many studies are conducted on IoT device virtualization in the cloud environment to facilitate remote access and control. In the future, IoT devices will be accessed through its corresponding virtual objects. Just like the network of physical devices, there needs to be a network of virtual objects in the cyber world. In this paper, we present a concept of building a dynamic virtual network in the cloud environment among connected IoT devices. The key idea is to provide a mechanism for building a virtual network among connected IoT devices from different domains through their corresponding virtual objects in the cloud environment. This will facilitate the sharing of resources and the rapid development of diverse applications on top of the virtualization layer by establishing a dynamic end-to-end connection between IoT devices. In this study, we present a detailed design of the proposed system for building a virtual IoT network. We have also implemented three application layers protocols in OMNET++ for simulation of a virtual objects network to conduct performance analysis of the proposed IoT network virtualization.