IoT service slicing and task offloading for edge computing

With the advancement of IoT technology, various domains such as smart factories, smart cities and smart cars use the IoT to provide value-added services. In addition, technologies such as MEC and network slicing provide another opportunity for the IoT to support more advanced and real-time services that could not have been previously supported. However, the simple integration of such technologies into the IoT does not take full advantage of MEC and network slicing or the reduction of latency and traffic prioritization, respectively. Therefore, there is a strong need for an efficient integration mechanism for IoT platforms to maximize the benefit of using such technologies. In this article, we introduce a novel architectural framework that enables the virtualization of an IoT platform with minimum functions to support specific IoT services and host the instance in an edge node, close to the end-user. As the instance provides its service at the edge node where the MEC node and network slice are located, the traffic for the end-user does not need to traverse back to the cloud. This architecture guarantees not only low latency but also efficient management of IoT services at the edge node. To show the feasibility of the proposed architecture, we conduct an experimental evaluation by comparing the transmission time of both IoT services running on the central cloud and those using sliced IoT functions in the edge gateway. The results show that the proposed architecture provides two times faster transmission time than that from the conventional cloud-based IoT platform.