IIoT-MEC: A Novel Mobile Edge Computing Framework for 5G-enabled IIoT

Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a revolution which is changing the visage of industry in a profound manner. However, it brings many opportunities as well as many puzzles and challenges. Facing with billions of programmable IIoT devices, the traditional IIoT architecture based on cloud computing is no longer suitable, therefore, Mobile Edge Computing (MEC) has been seen as the promising technology to support IIoT business in 5G era. However, the existing mainstream MEC framework exposes numerous problems when supporting IIoT, such as complex development, low development reuse rate, poor software maintainability and mobility, poor flexibility, etc. Therefore, in order to solve the problems mentioned above, in this paper, we propose IIoT-MEC, a novel MEC framework specially for IIoT. We use Docker container to slice computing and storage resources of MEC server into numerous resource blocks (RBs). Based on the concept of virtualization, some RBs for “Device Function Virtualization (DFV)” are used to map physical devices into virtual devices and present in a set of normalized APIs, which shield the hardware development of diverse IIoT devices, so as to simplify the IIoT development into software development only. Some RBs are used to support the operation of IIoT services, in the form of distributed computing. On these basis, a flexible object-oriented IIoT development architecture is constructed. IIoT-MEC can overcome the drawbacks of the existing MEC framework in supporting IIoT. And the implementation procedure of IIoT-MEC is demonstrated with an application example. We also discuss how the IIoT-MEC would be used and what we need to do in future research.