DIANE – Dynamic IoT Application Deployment

By Michael Vögler, Johannes M Schleicher, Christian Inzinger and Schahram Dustdar.

In Proceedings of the IEEE 4th International Conference on Mobile Services, Special Track - Services for the Ubiquitous Web, pp. to appear, 2015.

Applications in the Internet of Things (IoT) domain need to manage and integrate huge amounts of heterogenous devices. Usually these devices are treated as external dependencies residing at the edge of the infrastructure mainly transmitting sensed data or reacting to their environment. Recently however, a fundamental shift in the basic nature of these devices is taking place. More and more IoT devices emerge that are not simple sensors or transmitters, but provide limited execution environments. This opens up a huge opportunity to utilize these previously untapped processing power in order to offload custom application logic directly to these edge devices. To effectively exploit this new type of device the design of IoT applications needs to change to also consider devices that are deployed on the edge of the infrastructure. The deployment of parts of the application’s business logic on the device will not only increase the overall robustness of the application, but can also reduce communication overhead. To allow for flexible provisioning of applications whose deployment topology evolves over time, a clear separation of independently executable application components is needed. In this paper, we present DIANE, a framework for the dynamic generation of optimized deployment topologies for IoT cloud applications that are tailored to the currently available physical infrastructure. Based on a declarative, constraint-based model of the desired application deployment, our approach enables flexible provisioning of application components on edge devices deployed in the field. DIANE supports different IoT application topologies and we show that our solution elastically provisions application deployment topologies using a cloud-based testbed.