Data Distribution Service-Based Architecture Design for the Internet of Things Systems

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is the internetworking of people and physical devices often called “things” that enable the collection and exchange of data. The number of connections between people and things, as well as the volume of data that is generated by the “things,” is dramatically increasing. In this context, various kinds of data are generated by multiple heterogeneous devices, which operate in different ways and used by different applications with different aims. To realize the distributed execution of IoT systems over multiple resources, different requirements and quality factors must be satisfied. Traditionally, to reduce the effort for developing distributed systems, middleware architectures have been introduced that provide common services such as name and directory services, discovery, data exchange, synchronization, and transaction services, etc. To address the needs and integration of IoT systems, the adoption of middleware seems to be a feasible solution. The Data Distribution Service (DDS) is a middleware that is directly related to data-intensive systems and explicitly considers the quality of service. It is a standard data-centric publish-subscribe programming model and specification for distributed systems that has been applied for the development of high-performance distributed systems such as in the defense, finance, automotive, and simulation domains. In this chapter, we explore and propose the adoption of DDS as a middleware platform for IoT systems. For this, we first describe the requirements for IoT systems and present the IoT reference architecture. Subsequently, we provide a DDS-based architecture for IoT systems based on the Views and Beyond Approach.