DevOps for IoT Applications Using Cellular Networks and Cloud

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a vision of a future society where an ever-increasing number of heterogeneous physical devices ("things") obtain Internet connectivity, thus enabling a large number of applications for a broad range of industries and society at large. Mobile network operators, expected to provide the network infrastructure for many of these applications, face an unprecedented level of complexity. This complexity not only relates to the number of applications that share the network infrastructure, but also to the different network Quality of Service (QoS) requirements these applications have. To achieve economies of scale, automation in management of those applications throughout their lifecycle is essential. In this paper, we propose an architecture that automates allocation, monitoring and deallocation of both cloud and cellular network resources to ensure QoS for applications that involve connected devices communicating with cloud-hosted software. We describe an implementation of this architecture using a combination of open source, commercial, and custom components and evaluate it through a series of measurements. Results show that our implementation can simultaneously support mobile broadband and low latency, high availability mission-critical applications.