Design and Performance Evaluation of Containerized Microservices on Edge Gateway in Mobile IoT

Recently, Internet of Things (IoT) has drawn a great deal of attention and is envisioned in various sectors in the near future due to its promising benefits. However, the constant and rapid growth in IoT devices also brings new challenges due to constrained power and resources associated to them. One of the challenges is to provide seamless connectivity in mobile IoT. Secondly, IoT devices may stream enormous amount of data; hence, providing a solution that can effectively reduce service cost of data transfer. Finally, there are challenges in management and deployment of services running at mobile IoT Edge Gateway. In this context, containerized virtualization solution could play a key role in support of efficient management and deployment of microservices to provide seamless connectivity. This paper proposes a lightweight container-based virtualization technology for IoT, which employs Docker container-based microservices architecture for effectively deploying applications in a virtualized ecosystem. We evaluated the performance of the proposed solution on real IoT testbed using Raspberry Pi 3 as a mobile IoT Edge Gateway for network handover decision making among various alternatives, such as Wi-Fi, Radio, and Satellite. The results demonstrated better performance compared with the native environment, i.e., the one without introduction of a virtualization layer. The results also showed that the Docker container produces negligible resource overhead and can be used on resource constrained mobile IoT Edge Gateway devices like Raspberry Pi 3 for efficiently managing IoT application and services.