Experiments on Approaches of Virtualization for Industrial Internet of Things applications

New technologies that comes with recent trends like Internet of Things, Cloud and 5G are promoting new platforms and communication solutions. These trends have also started to impact traditional industrial automation systems, since end customers are starting to expect new services, such as, business intelligence and diagnostic information anywhere at any time. Moreover, the cloud providers lease their infrastructure to be used for deployment of applications using virtualization. Therefore, this paper aims at exploring the possibilities of different virtualization platforms offered by various cloud providers and benchmark the technologies with platforms frequently used within industry. The platform performance was evaluated by conducting experiments with an industrial application, focusing on typical industrial aspect such as latency, jitter and availability. In addition to more industrial focused metrics, the findings in comparison with other related experiments indicate that specific application requirements have an effect on performance. Hence, application specific evaluations may be necessary before taking any decision on where an industrial application may be deployed.