Towards a control-as-a-service architecture for smart environments

Abstract

The popularization of the Internet of Things has opened opportunities for applications in various economic sectors, allowing them to monitor and control various types of environments. However, with the increasing number of data sent by devices, applications have come to demand increased availability and Internet bandwidth, but these demands are still a bottleneck in regions farther from large urban centers and with less economic development. In this work, we examine how bandwidth limitations can affect cloud-based applications and propose a Fog Computing-based Control-as-a-Service architecture to dynamically process events in the context of Internet of Things and Smart Environments. The architecture is composed of a Rules Engine and a Complex Event Processor based on Supervisory Control techniques for Discrete Event Systems. The Rules Engine allows defining dynamic rules conditioning control from different types of input data. The Complex Event Processor with automatic synthesis and reconfiguration capability allows performing control actions to established rules. Finally, we present scenarios where this solution can be applied, such as Smart Farm, Smart Home, Smart City, and Smart Healthcare.