Developing Maintainable Application-Centric IoT Ecosystems
Michiel Willocx, Ilse Bohé, Jan Vossaert, Vincent Naessens · 2018
The amount of Internet-of-Things (IoT) ecosystems that are rolled out in various domains is still increasing. Despite their ability to optimize business processes and increase well-being in various ways, many companies are currently struggling to design and maintain complex IoT ecosystems in a cost-efficient way. A major reason is the vendor lock-in trap that is often triggered by sensor-centric application development. This paper presents application-centric development as an alternative approach to tackle maintainability problems in IoT ecosystems. The paradigm shift is supported by a layered architecture SMIoT, which guides the design of Smart and Maintainable IoT ecosystems. The key qualities of the proposed architecture are reconfigurability, context-awareness and separation of concerns. Furthermore, the architectural principles are adopted in an Android framework implementation and validated through the design of a fleet management ecosystem.