Energy-Aware Placement for IoT-Service Function Chain

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become a masterpiece in today networks since it provides a way to digitalize our physical world. The proliferation of IoT devices offers new opportunities to enhance many aspects of our daily lives such as eHealth, Smart cities, Domestics, etc. Meanwhile, Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) technologies are drawing an increasing attention nowadays by offering more flexibility and programmability compared to traditional network solution. We believe that building IoT services on top of NFV/SDN enabling technologies will be one of the key research area in the near future. In this paper, we investigate how NFV concept can be extended to IoT to allow decoupling IoT functionalities from specific dedicated devices. As a result, an IoT device becomes a whitebox that can be augmented with different functionalities instantiated and linked with other cloud-based functions to build end-to-end services. Furthermore, we propose an energy efficient solution for the placement of IoT Service Function Chain (IoTSFC) using an exact Mixed Integer Program (MIP) solution and a Genetic Algorithm (GA) heuristic to deal with scalability issue.