Inter-Cloud Communication Through Gatekeepers to Support IoT Service Interaction in the Arrowhead Framework

Abstract

Although we live in the era of Internet of Things (IoT), many issues on system-interoperability are still not tackled at large. There are limitations for ever-growing IoT realms, especially in resource-constrained domains, where low latency is crucial, and local processing power is a scarce resource. Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) provide functional and configuration flexibility in closed communication environments, where security and service-related orchestration issues are controlled within the local network. For automation systems, these SOA-based networks can have core services, such as Service Registry, Orchestration, Authorization, and so on. A set of such core services are defined, implemented and made available through the Arrowhead Framework. Since the Core Services are distributed resources available for all systems that wish to consume them, these networked services can be considered a cloud. As one cloud cannot serve for all, there is a need for such automation system clouds to interact with each other: use the services of one from another. This paper presents a solution for providing inter-Cloud servicing capabilities in the Arrowhead framework by introducing a gatekeeper concept. The main idea is to extend the service discovery functionality outside the boundaries of a single cloud, and solve the security and orchestration issues in a way that fits into the general Arrowhead concept. This paper also introduces the methodology of creating secure connections between service consumers and providers situated in different clouds.