Secure Edge Computing Management Based on Independent Microservices Providers for Gateway-Centric IoT Networks

Abstract

Edge computing is an emerging computing paradigm that distributes the computational capability to the edge of networks for enabling the computation near to the environment where the sensors and actuators are deployed. Therefore, from the network edge, heterogeneous solutions can be provided to the Internet based on sufficient computing ability. Nevertheless, computing and networking resources are constrained for devices in the network edge. Providing secure services from edge computing is a challenge based on constrained resources. In this paper, we propose a secure edge computing to provide management of device, data, user and additional services based on deploying independent microservices providers with a security gateway on an edge gateway. The edge gateway is the hub of a local network where multiple IoT devices are deployed to interact with the physical environment for sensing and actuating. The gateway provides the management functionalities through microservices based on multiple independent server modules. Each gateway-centric local network has a standalone management service based on the gateway. For providing secure edge computing services through the edge gateway, a security gateway is deployed on the proposed edge gateway to provide Representational State Transfer Application Programming Interfaces to expose the security services to the Internet instead of microservices from management modules. Moreover, a client support gateway is deployed in the edge gateway to provide services of User Interface and access forwarding based on web sessions to support user authentication and authorization with the security gateway. Based on the proposed edge gateway including client support and security gateway, IoT clients and IoT devices are enabled to communicate for providing secure edge services of access and visualization to users.