Enabling High-Level Application Development for the Internet of Things

Application development in the Internet of Things (IoT) is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues such as lack of separation of concerns, and lack of high-level of abstractions to address both the large scale and heterogeneity. Moreover, stakeholders involved in the application development have to address issues that can be attributed to different life-cycles phases. when developing applications. First, the application logic has to be analyzed and then separated into a set of distributed tasks for an underlying network. Then, the tasks have to be implemented for the specific hardware. Apart from handling these issues, they have to deal with other aspects of life-cycle such as changes in application requirements and deployed devices. Several approaches have been proposed in the closely related fields of wireless sensor network, ubiquitous and pervasive computing, and software engineering in general to address the above challenges. However, existing approaches only cover limited subsets of the above mentioned challenges when applied to the IoT. This paper proposes an integrated approach for addressing the above mentioned challenges. The main contributions of this paper are: (1) a development methodology that separates IoT application development into different concerns and provides a conceptual framework to develop an application, (2) a development framework that implements the development methodology to support actions of stakeholders. The development framework provides a set of modeling languages to specify each development concern and abstracts the scale and heterogeneity related complexity. It integrates code generation, task-mapping, and linking techniques to provide automation. Code generation supports the application development phase by producing a programming framework that allows stakeholders to focus on the application logic, while our mapping and linking techniques together support the deployment phase by producing device-specific code to result in a distributed system collaboratively hosted by individual devices. Our evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our approach improves the productivity of stakeholders involved in the application development

Enabling High-Level Application Development in Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) combines Wireless Sensor and Actuation Networks (WSANs), Pervasive computing, and the elements of the ''traditional'' Internet such as Web and database servers. This leads to the dual challenges of scale and heterogeneity in these systems, which comprise a large number of devices of different characteristics. In view of the above, developing IoT applications is challenging because it involves dealing with a wide range of related issues, such as lack of separation of concerns, need for domain experts to write low level code, and lack of specialized domain specific languages (DSLs). Existing software engineering approaches only cover a limited subset of the above-mentioned challenges. In this work, we propose an application development process for the IoT that aims to comprehensively address the above challenges. We first present the semantic model of the IoT, based on which we identify the roles of the various stakeholders in the development process, viz., domain expert, software designer, application developer, device developer, and network manager, along with their skills and responsibilities. To aid them in their tasks, we propose a model-driven development approach which uses customized languages for each stage of the development process: Srijan Vocabulary Language SVL for specifying the domain vocabulary, Srijan Architecture Language(SAL) for specifying the architecture of the application, and Srijan Network Language SNL for expressing the properties of the network on which the application will execute; each customized to the skill level and area of expertise of the relevant stakeholder. For the application developer specifying the internal details of each software component, we propose the use of a customized generated framework using a language such as Java. Our DSL-based approach is supported by code generation and task-mapping techniques in an application development tool developed by us. Our initial evaluation based on two realistic scenarios shows that the use of our techniques/framework succeeds in improving productivity while developing IoT applications

A Semantic-enabled Framework For Future Internet Of Things Applications

While the challenge of connecting Internet of Things (IoT) devices at the lowest layer has been widely studied, integrating and interoperating huge amounts of sensed data of heterogeneous IoT devices is becoming increasingly important because of the possibility of consuming such data in supporting many potential novel IoT applications. A common approach to processing and consuming IoT data is a centralized paradigm: sensor data is sent over the network to a comparatively powerful central server or a cloud service, where all processing takes place. However, this approach has some limitations as it requires devices to interact directly with a cloud which is not cost effective. First, it has high demands on the device's storage and computational capabilities. Second, as devices grow rapidly in a deployment area, sending all the data to a centralized cloud server requires high network bandwidth. Moreover, this often creates data privacy concerns as all raw data will be sent to a centralized place. To address the above limitations for building future Internet of Things applications, we present an early design of a novel framework that combines Internet of Things, Semantic Web, and Big Data concepts. We not only present the core components to build an IoT system, but also list existing alternatives with their merits. This framework aims to incorporate open standards to address the potential challenges in building future IoT applications. Therefore, our discussion revolves around open standards to build the framework, rather than proprietary standards