A Framework based on SDN and Containers for Dynamic Service Chains on IoT Gateways

In this paper, we describe a new approach for managing service function chains in scenarios where data from Internet of Things (IoT) devices is partially processed at the network edge. Our framework is enabled by two emerging technologies, Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and container based virtualization, which ensure several benefits in terms of flexibility, easy programmability, and versatility. These features are well suitable with the increasingly stringent requirements of IoT applications, and allow a dynamic and automated network service chaining. An extensive performance evaluation, which has been carried out by means of a testbed, seeks to understand how our proposed framework performs in terms of computational overhead, network bandwidth, and energy consumption. By accounting for the constraints of typical IoT gateways, our evaluation tries to shed light on the actual deployability of the framework on low-power nodes.