Design and implementation of an IoT-cloud converged virtual machine system

This paper presents an internet-of-things (IoT)-cloud converged virtual machine (VM) system for IoT devices with restricted computing resources. The VM is a software processor that has many advantages in terms of software development, release, maintenance, etc., owing to its platform independence. However, in low-performance devices it has a significant disadvantage because its use is restricted by high execution overheads at the software interpretation level. This paper proposes a VM system for IoT devices that solves this problem while retaining the advantages of VM technology using a lightweight interpreter model and cloud-based computation offloading. The proposed interpreter solves the limited memory/performance problem when running VMs on low-performance devices using two-level instruction-to-native function matching techniques. Furthermore, by solving the low-performance issues of IoT devices using cloud-based offloading, the proposed IoT-cloud VM can run applications that require high-performance computing even when the target hardware system is a low-power IoT device.