A Lightweight Slice-Based Quality of Service Manager for IoT

Abstract

Industry 4.0 and digital farming rely on modern communication and computation technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) to provide smart manufacturing and farming systems. Having in mind a scenario with a high number of heterogeneous connected devices, with varying technologies and characteristics, the deployment of Industry 4.0 and digital farming solutions faces innovative challenges in different domains (e.g., communications, security, quality of service). Concepts such as network slicing and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) provide the means for faster, simpler, scalable and flexible solutions in order to serve a wide range of applications with different Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. Hence, this paper proposes a lightweight slice-based QoS manager for non-3GPP IoT focusing on different use cases and their varying requirements and characteristics. Our focus in this work is on non-3GPP IoT unlicensed wireless technologies and not specifically the end-to-end network slice perspective as described in 5G standards. We implemented and evaluated different QoS models in distinct scenarios in a real experimental environment in order to illustrate the potential of the proposed solution.