Sensorclone: a framework for harnessing smart devices with virtual sensors

IoT services hosted by low-power devices rely on the cloud infrastructure to propagate their ubiquitous presence over the Internet. A critical challenge for IoT systems is to ensure continuous provisioning of IoT services by overcoming network breakdowns, hardware failures, and energy constraints. To overcome these issues, we propose a cloud-based framework namely SensorClone, which relies on virtual devices to improve IoT resilience. A virtual device is the digital counterpart of a physical device that has learned to emulate its operations from sample data collected from the physical one. SensorClone exploits the collected data of low-power devices to create virtual devices in the cloud. SensorClone then can opportunistically migrate virtual devices from the cloud into other devices, potentially underutilized, with higher capabilities and closer to the edge of the network, e.g., smart devices. Through a real deployment of our SensorClone in the wild, we identify that virtual devices can be used for two purposes, 1) to reduce the energy consumption of physical devices by duty cycling their service provisioning between the physical device and the virtual representation hosted in the cloud, and 2) to scale IoT services at the edge of the network by harnessing temporal periods of underutilization of smart devices. To evaluate our framework, we present a use case of a virtual sensor created from an IoT service of temperature. From our results, we verify that it is possible to achieve unlimited availability up to 90% and substantial power efficiency under acceptable levels of quality of service. Our work makes contributions towards improving IoT scalability and resilience by using virtual devices.