The circuit breaker pattern targeted to future IoT applications

In the context of the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a growing trend towards increasing the integration and collaboration between IoT systems to create relevant end-to-end solutions. Accordingly, addressing dependability in the future IoT applications will surely be more challenging. In this work, we examine a popular microservices pattern known as Circuit Breaker (CB). This pattern aims at preventing failure from cascading to dependent services. In the context of IoT, it can be used as an intermediary in the communication between critical IoT nodes to increase the dependability of the whole. Notwithstanding, some particularities present in IoT must be considered to allow this pattern to yield similar benefits. Therefore, we compile several aspects concerning the design and implementation of the CB tailored to IoT applications as a taxonomy. Also, we conduct an experimental validation to compare the benefits of the CB in a prototype of a trac light system