Orchestration of a MEC-based multi-protocol IoT environment

Nowadays we are witnessing to a continuous increasing of the number of IoT devices that must be configured and supported by modern networks. Considering an industrial environment, there is a huge number of these devices that need to coexist at the same time. Each one of them is using its own communication/transport protocol, and a huge effort needs to be done during the setup of the system. In addition, there are also different kind of architectures that can be used. That’s why the network setup is not so easy in this kind of heterogeneous environment. The answer to all these problems can be found in the emerging cloud and edge computing architectures, allowing new opportunities and challenges. They are capable of enable on-demand deployment of all the IoT services. In this thesis is proposed a Multi-access Edge Computing (MEC) approach to face all the possible multi-protocol scenarios. All the services are transformed into MEC-based services, even if they are running over multiple technological domains. As result, was proved that this kind of solution is effective and can simplify the deployment of IoT services by using some APIs defined by the MEC standard. As above mentioned, one of the most important tasks of these new generation’s networks is to be self-configurable in very low amount of time and this will be the scope of my research. The aim of this thesis is to try to reduce as much as possible the time that a certain network requires to be self-configured in an automatic way considering an Industrial IoT as a Service (IIoTaaS) scenario.