Cloud of Things Modeling for Efficient and Coordinated Resources Provisioning

The shift towards the Cloud of Things (CoT) requires a seamless integration of Cloud Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT). Such transition promotes a holistic approach for managing and orchestrating cloud and IoT infrastructures. However, existing platforms manage each domain individually. They provision cloud and IoT resources separately without a global vision on the underlying infrastructure and network state. Moreover, resource models provided by these platforms do not cope with the CoT requirements. In this paper, we study existing resource models for cloud and the IoT. Afterward, we select the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) specifications to represent the CoT environment on the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the Platform as a Service (PaaS) levels. We extend the chosen standard to model the CoT for IaaS and PaaS. We show through two example scenarios the benefit of our model in representing the CoT and performing an efficient global provisioning of incoming requests. Furthermore, we rely on the OCCI CoT extension to formulate an analytical model and show through a simulation the benefit of such global orchestration.