Toward the generation of deployable distributed IoT system on the cloud

Abstract

The Internet of Things contains a number of smart devices and tools that collect and communicate sensing data, with different processing services. The diversity of IoT devices and tools in terms of the resources and the required software raises DevOp challenges for the provisioning of IoT applications. In addition, the IoT system requires a number of heterogeneous computations on the devices which form altogether with the diversity of the IoT devices new issues and challenges for the deployment of the distributed IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a new approach to generate a deployable model for the distributed IoT systems that is based on simplified, user-friendly declarative description of the smart devices’ communication, configuration, installation and computation with the IoT system parts. Our approach uses the Ansible-based YAML description for modelling and implementing the deployable IoT system on different infrastructures. The aim of this work is to minimize the efforts required to deploy the distributed IoT applications on various infrastructures including the Cloud by utilizing a simple description of the application and system components of the IoT application and environment. We motivate our work with real use case scenarios including a number of sensors, Raspberry Pi, local machine and AWS Cloud instances to show its feasibility and validity. Finally, an evaluation of our proposed approach is presented by conducting a number of experiments.