The Device Cloud - Applying Cloud Computing Concepts to the Internet of Things

The pervasiveness of connected embedded devices and Internet of Things (IoT) related application domains like smart cities, e-Health or, transportation lead to an constantly increasing amount of data, compute- and storage resources surrounding us. However, currently there is a gap between data acquisition and processing, usually bridged by gateway based approaches that integrate the devices and forward the data to Clouds in order to be processed. Integration is often static and limited to a certain application domain, which the gateway is able to support. In addition, processing does not consider the compute- and storage resources already made available by the growing amount of smart devices, like smart TVs or smart phones. As a solution, we propose the Device Cloud, which can be envisioned as an application of the Cloud Computing Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) paradigms to the IoT domain. The approach will allow sharing and on demand provisioning of resources provided by the connected embedded devices surrounding us. Besides introducing an architecture draft to provide a common understanding of the overall problem, the main focus of the paper is to discuss challenges that arise and give a state of the art review of related research initiatives that are eligible to contribute to possible solutions.