Integrating IoT Devices Based on Automatically Generated Scale-Out Plans

摘要

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a trend of connecting physical objects to the Internet. IoT applications running together with interconnected objects enable the vision of gathering data and based on that act in physical environments with minimal human intervention. Maintaining such IoT applications needs to incorporate different software and hardware components to build up the network of things that delivers the data of sensors and controls actuators. However, the effort of installation, configuration and management of a growing number of IoT devices increases the complexity of integrating such heterogeneous hard- and software. Automating the configuration of IoT devices, i.e., reducing the effort of configuring the devices in the target vicinity, reduces cost, complexity and the occurrence of errors. We propose the usage of automatically generated Scale-Out Plans on the basis of the OASIS standard TOSCA. The overall approach is based on the ability to mark regions inside TOSCA application models, that must be scaled out when new devices are registered for the overall application. From this marked model we generate Scale-Out Plans that are able to create instances of software components enabling the automated configuration of IoT devices. We prove the technical feasibility of our approach by a prototypical implementation based on our previous work.