Title: SMIoT: a software architecture for maintainable internet-of-things applications

Authors: Ilse Bohé; Michiel Willocx; Vincent Naessens

Addresses: imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven, Technology Campus Ghent, Gebroeders de Smetstraat 1, 9000 Ghent, Belgium ' imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven, Technology Campus Ghent, Gebroeders de Smetstraat 1, 9000 Ghent, Belgium ' imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven, Technology Campus Ghent, Gebroeders de Smetstraat 1, 9000 Ghent, Belgium

Abstract: Developing sustainable IoT applications is by far no sinecure. Many IoT apps that are currently on the market can only be coupled with a fixed set of edge devices or technologies. On the contrary, IoT sensors and actuators evolve at a fast pace degrading the attractiveness of many IoT applications over time. The vendor lock-in trap 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 called SMIoT, which guides the design of advanced IoT ecosystems. Applying the architectural principles result in IoT apps that can easily cope with new technologies that come to the market, hence, increasing their lifetime and offering various infrastructural alternatives to end-users. Furthermore, the architectural principles are adopted in an Android framework implementation and validated through the design of a healthcare ecosystem.

Keywords: internet-of-things; IoT; software architecture; application development; maintainable; sustainable; application-centric; framework; Android; edge devices; tackling vendor lock-in.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCC.2020.105875

International Journal of Cloud Computing, 2020 Vol.9 No.1, pp.75 - 94

Received: 31 Dec 2018
Accepted: 19 Jun 2019
Published online: 16 Mar 2020 *

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