Consolidate IoT Edge Computing with Lightweight Virtualization

Lightweight virtualization (LV) technologies have refashioned the world of software development by introducing flexibility and new ways of managing and distributing software. Edge computing complements today's powerful centralized data centers with a large number of distributed nodes that provide virtualization close to the data source and end users. This emerging paradigm offers ubiquitous processing capabilities on a wide range of heterogeneous hardware characterized by different processing power and energy availability. The scope of this article is to present an in-depth analysis on the requirements of edge computing from the perspective of three selected use cases that are particularly interesting for harnessing the power of the Internet of Things. We discuss and compare the applicability of two LV technologies, containers and unikernels, as platforms for enabling the scalability, security, and manageability required by such pervasive applications that soon may be part of our everyday lives. To inspire further research, we identify open problems and highlight future directions to serve as a road map for both industry and academia.