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In smart communities, data are aggregated, and various services are provided based on it. When considering the optimization of service delivery through cooperative processing between the edge and the cloud in smart communities, it is essential to realize network transparent edge services due to the constraints of not touching end devices in order to improve user convenience and additional cost reduction. Moreover, considering the minimization of service provision and service delivery latency at the edge, it is desirable to use field‐programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), which have lower power consumption, lower latency, and higher throughput than conventional processors. Additionally, to advance towards even lower latency, the distribution of processing load is important, and service migration is necessary for this purpose. Service migration is generally used to increase service availability, and even for edge services, service migration is important because the distribution of processing and the location where the service should be provided changes over time due to user mobility. When considering network transparency, service migration should be performed on the communication path between the end device and the cloud. Furthermore, to enhance service transparency, it is essential to maintain communication consistency for continuous service provision and minimize service downtime. Therefore, this study proposes a migration mechanism with FPGAs to satisfy these requirements. As an example of a real application, we target a network‐transparent data anonymization application to protect the privacy of data providers and evaluate the proposed architecture based on the reality of latency and other factors. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With increasing attention to the secondary use of data, privacy protection laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have come into force to protect residents from unauthorized exploitation of personal data. Flow management is an effective method to track the distribution of user data in a multi‐domain network environment. Transparency in the relationship between data and service providers is essential to track the status of data provision. Vendor and Consumer Relationship Management (VCRM) manages this relationship by regulating relevant flow information. VCRM is expected to collaborate with the edge‐computing environment in the management of regional unit flow, wherein all access to personal user data should be restricted in accordance with the stakeholders' requests. Accordingly, this study proposes a packet processing function that collaborates with VCRM to manage the access control of flows passing through a regional network. Moreover, this paper proposes methods to reduce packet processing time on the switch, and requests to the switch controller. Using tag‐based matching and cache injection methods, the number of requests to the controller decreased to 33.4% of the original figure. Our proposed method also reduces the total processing time on flow management switches in the network environment in the analysis of encrypted TCP streams such as HTTP over TLS and MQTT over TLS. © 2023 Institute of Electrical Engineer of Japan and Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, while internet of things (IoT) devices and cloud computing environments have been penetrated, the increase in communication latency and concentration of traffic caused by data centers has deteriorated the quality of some network services. Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) is a well‐known protocol for exchanging messages between dedicated applications. MQTT employs a publish–subscribe model in which a broker mediates communication between IoT devices and applications. To improve service quality, the processing latency of the broker should be reduced. Moreover, the broker's throughput must be increased. IoT devices, in particular, must maintain a highly accurate time to provide some IoT services. This study proposed hardware implementation of MQTT broker and evaluated the accuracy of an MQTT‐based time synchronization method. The proposed MQTT architecture's hardware resource utilization is also provided. We confirmed that our implementation achieved high throughput, low latency, and low jitter MQTT broker, which satisfies the smart city services for automated drive and power control, which must be less than a few milliseconds. © 2021 Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan. Published by Wiley Periodicals LLC. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many cloud providers offer IoT services that simplify the collection and processing of IoT information. However, the IoT infrastructure composed of sensors and actuators that produces this information remains outside the cloud; therefore, application developers must install, connect and manage the cloud. This requirement can be a market barrier, especially for small/medium software companies that cannot afford the infrastructural costs associated with it and would only prefer to focus on IoT application developments. Motivated by the wish to eliminate this barrier, this paper proposes a Cloud of Things platform, called VirIoT, which fully brings the Infrastructure as a service model typical of cloud computing to the world of Internet of Things. VirIoT provides users with virtual IoT infrastructures (Virtual Silos) composed of virtual things, with which users can interact through dedicated and standardized broker servers in which the technology can be chosen among those offered by the platform, such as oneM2M, NGSI and NGSI-LD. VirIoT allows developers to focus their efforts exclusively on IoT applications without worrying about infrastructure management and allows cloud providers to expand their IoT services portfolio. VirIoT uses external things and cloud/edge computing resources to deliver the IoT virtualization services. Its open-source architecture is microservice-based and runs on top of a distributed Kubernetes platform with nodes in central and edge data centers. The architecture is scalable, efficient and able to support the continuous integration of heterogeneous things and IoT standards, taking care of interoperability issues. Using a VirIoT deployment spanning data centers in Europe and Japan, we conducted a performance evaluation with a two-fold objective: showing the efficiency and scalability of the architecture; and leveraging VirIoT's ability to integrate different IoT standards in order to make a fair comparison of some open-source IoT Broker implementations, namely Mobius for oneM2M, Orion for NGSIv2, Orion-LD and Scorpio for NGSI-LD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]