A Hardware Virtualization Scheme for Reconfigurable Service Providing in the Internet of Things Era

With the emergence of the Internet of Things, there is a growing demand for distributed and federated processing in consortium with several devices. One current trend is to use devices as processing hubs, providing services such as Software as a Service, Hardware as a Service and Storage as a Service. In this context, reconfigurable computing with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) brings a new perspective since modern devices have hardware/software flexibility to change their behaviour according to the application. A Hardware as a Service (HaS) scheme for hardware virtualization is necessary to support the different demands. Integrating software applications with FPGA implementations via their physical interfaces (IO) poses considerable challenges, hindering the integration of software and hardware solutions. This paper introduces a software architecture paired with FPGA technology to establish an isolated, decoupled, and scalable testing environment. The proposed methodology and its implementation demonstrate the efficacy of this approach in facilitating rapid prototyping and deployment. The results indicate successful integration with minimal development effort.