Federated IoT services leveraging 5G technologies at the edge

The Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem is evolving towards the deployment of integrated environments, wherein heterogeneous devices pool their capacities together to match wide-ranging user and service requirements. As a consequence, solutions for efficient and synergistic cooperation among objects acquire great relevance. Along this line, this paper focuses on the adoption of the promising MIFaaS (Mobile-IoT-Federation-as-a-Service) paradigm to support delay-sensitive applications for high-end IoT devices in next-to-come fifth generation (5G) environments. MIFaaS fosters the provisioning of IoT services and applications with low-latency requirements by leveraging cooperation among private/public clouds of IoT objects at the edge of the network. A performance assessment of the MIFaaS paradigm in a cellular 5G environment based on both Long Term Evolution (LTE) and the recent Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) is presented. Obtained results demonstrate that the proposed solution outperforms classic approaches, highlighting significant benefits derived from the joint use of LTE and NB-IoT bandwidths in terms of increased number of successfully delivered IoT services. © 2017 Elsevier B.V.