User-space network tunneling under a mobile platform: A case study for android environments

Abstract

© Springer International Publishing AG 2017. The IoT ecosystem is taking the whole ICT world by storm and, in particular for currently hot topics such as Smart Cities, it is becoming one of the key enablers for innovative applications and services. When talking about end users, or even citizens, mobiles enter the picture as the ultimate personal gadget, as well as relevant outlets for most of the duties (sensing, networking, edge computing) IoT devices are typically envisioned in the first place. Smartphones, tablets and similar accessories are even more powerful in terms of hardware capabilities (and function diversity) than typical embedded systems for IoT, but it is typically the software platform (e.g., the OS and SDK) which limits choices for the sake of security and control on the user experience. Even a relatively open environment, such as Android, exhibits these limits, in stark contrast to the otherwise very powerful and feature-complete functionalities the underlying system (i.e., Linux) natively supports. In this work the authors describe a fully user-friendly and platform-compliant approach to let users break free from some of these limitations, in particular with regard to network virtualisation, for the purpose of extending an IoT-ready Smart City use case to mobiles.