Towards Internet of Services - SDN-enabled IMS Architecture for IoT Integration

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm is gaining tremendous popularity and the number of connected devices, or "things", is continuously growing, aiming to transform our everyday life. In order to address the real needs of the end user, the capabilities of the individual "things" have to be combined and offered as "services". The use of a local cloud of gateways that aggregate and analyze the data of different heterogeneous IoT devices and expose unified service oriented interfaces in support of machine-to-machine (M2M) applications has been presented in earlier works. This paper proposes a novel software-defined networking (SDN)-enabled IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture that aims to facilitate the provision of IoT-based services over an all-IP telecom service provider's network. The architecture combines the advantages of reduced network complexity and improved efficiency of network utilization that SDN brings with the standardized approach of service deployment and management over all-IP networks, offered by IMS.