Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 11, numbers 1 and 2, 2018 // View article

Testing the Feasibility of Residential Wireless Interfaces Virtualization

Authors:
Antonio da Silva Fariña
Ana Belén García Hernando
Mary Luz Mouronte López

Keywords: Residential IoT; Network Functions Virtualization; Software Defined Networking; USB interfaces virtualization; USB/IP tunneling

Abstract:
This work describes our proposal of leveraging two current networking trends, namely Network Functions Virtualization and Software Defined Networking, to enhance the flexibility with which residential IoT services can be offered to users. Concretely, we advocate for the potential virtualization of all the functionality that lies on top of the inhome wireless communications. These tasks, once virtualized, can be run in the cloud in the form of virtual machines or lightweight containers by using the Network Functions Virtualization capabilities of the Internet Service Provider. This way, the Internet Service Provider would also become a kind of “IoT Service Provider”. From a practical perspective, we have chosen Universal Serial Bus as the boundary on top of which the functionality would be virtualized and remotely executed. The main reason for this election is that Universal Serial Bus is widely adopted as a residential interface and there is an ample variety of wireless communications that can be accessed through Universal Serial Bus dongles with the appropriate drivers. Our idea is to tunnel the Universal Serial Bus blocks between the low level IoT gateway at home (which we have called Home Radio Head, or HRH) and the Internet Service Provider in order for the latter to access these flows and treat them accordingly to build IoT services for the residential user. These tunnels could be dynamically provisioned by using Software Defined Networking protocols. In this paper we elaborate not only on our architecture but also on the results we have obtained from tests run on a pilot, considering several networking configurations between the residential environment and the emulated Internet Service Provider premises. These tests range from purely functional proof of concepts to estimations of bandwidth and delays incurred when using our proposal. The figures obtained show that the idea is feasible, and point to cases where executing part of the virtualized functionality inside the Home Radio Head might be necessary for performance or bandwidth usage reasons

Pages: 65 to 77

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2018. Used with permission.

Publication date: June 30, 2018

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628