Posted by Theodora A. Varvarigou

Various attempts are conducted nowadays to shape the vision of the Future Internet, the Internet of Things and in general future flexible and scalable infrastructures, which will support and enable the provision of services that utilize different kinds of resources such as devices and digital equipment (e.g. sensors). Virtualization of resources (including computational nodes, supercomputers, workstation-clusters, network elements, data-storages, internet networks, etc) has been identified as a way that allows for service provision with Quality of Service attributes as requested by the end-users, maximizing at the same time the resource utilization on the service providers’ side. But what has been achieved nowadays in the aforementioned context? Current environments not only aggregate but also virtualize a large number of independent and geographically distributed computational and information resources. Furthermore, the advent of Service Oriented Infrastructures that take advantage of virtualization technologies made feasible the provision of services by addressing at the same time a set of challenges such as live migration, fault tolerance, quality of service etc. Nevertheless, dynamic virtualized infrastructures also include a number of non-virtualized resources (mainly referring to digital devices). And these are the resources that have not yet been virtualized, even though they consist as main elements in such environments: devices and digital equipment.

Taking into consideration that emerging applications are tightly coupled with the aforementioned digital devices, service offering is limited (a simple example refers to the guaranteed network links through virtual environments that cannot be provided to digital devices that are not part of them). Future applications, such as social networking environments, will not only use but will require device-enriched environments, which results to an increasing demand of services and as a domino effect to the complexity of their composition and management since the number of components disposed to failure will increase as the size of applications will increase in terms of factors such as devices, hardware components, software components and geographical scale.

Is virtualization of devices a trivial task? The answer is certainly “No”! In order to make the next step on virtualization, a number of aspects have to be addressed, ranging from data management – since high quality input will be transmitted from sensors of all kinds – to network management (due to the exponential traffic growth), privacy, data integrity issues as well as the economic and societal impact of new networked resources (sensors, actuators, communication devices, etc). Applications in the near future will connect any kind of devices and taking into account that computing became a commodity, research efforts need to focus on how digital equipment and devices with specific characteristics can be virtualized. Sensors, displays, actuators and – generally – any type of electronic, interactive mechanism will be soon regarded as an integral part of dynamic virtualized infrastructures.