Rapid prototyping of IoT applications with Esperanto compiler

Abstract

Integrating various networked devices, the Internet of Things (IoT) enables various new services like home automation, making its market larger and more competitive. Although rapid development of an IoT application is crucial to keep up with the highly competitive IoT market, developing an IoT application is challenging for programmers because the programmers should integrate multiple programmable devices and heterogeneous third-party devices. Some IoT frameworks integrate programming environments of multiple devices, but they either require device-specific implementation for third-party devices without any device abstraction, or abstract all the devices to the standard interfaces requiring unnecessary abstraction of programmable devices. This work introduces the Esperanto framework that integrates IoT devices with selective abstraction, allowing rapid prototyping of an IoT application. Exploiting the correspondence between an object and a thing in the object oriented programming (OOP) model, the Esperanto framework allows programmers to write only one OOP program instead of multiple programs for each device, and to manipulate third-party devices with their common ancestor classes. Compared to an existing approach on the integrated IoT programming, Esperanto requires 33.3% fewer lines of code to implement 5 IoT services, and reduces their response time by 44.8% on average. Moreover, with an empirical study, this work shows that the Esperanto framework reduces the development time by 52.7%.