Federations of connected things for delay-sensitive IoT services in 5G environments

In this paper the MIFaaS (Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service) paradigm is proposed to support delay sensitive applications in the Internet of Things (IoT). This objective is reached by leveraging on the federation of distributed services and things at the infrastructure Edge and exploiting the real-world awareness and capabilities of IoT devices at the ground. MIFaaS enables value-added services by implementing the dynamic cooperation among private/public clouds of IoT objects with the purpose to enhance the efficiency in the provisioning of delay-constrained IoT services and increase the number of successfully delivered IoT services. The proposed paradigm is studied in a cellular environment based on standard Long Term Evolution (LTE). The simulative results we present demonstrate how the proposed federation solution of private/public IoT clouds outperforms alternative solutions with no federations and support of resources offered by the Cloud. Moreover, an analysis of the limitations and of the possible enhancements for cellular systems to support the proposed paradigm is drawn.