Democratizing The Internet Of Things Through Platform Virtualization

Abstract

Towards realizing the vision for Industry 4.0 (I4.0) and Industry 5.0 (I5.0) rapid research and development in their core enablers is essential. Along with the recent advances in cloud computing, most research efforts focus on the upper layers of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). However, a significant number of challenges remain unresolved in the lower layers. We believe that the key to catalyze the development of IIoT is to focus on accelerating the development of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. However, software development in the IoT industry is significantly challenged when compared to other industries (e.g. financial services). This disadvantage is primarily due to the diverse number of IoT platforms available, additionally, the lack of cross- platform software compatibility further hinders the ability to apply modern software development methodologies in the IoT sector. In addition, the IoT industry involves a wide diversity of peripherals, each using a different type of interfacing technology. Such diversity creates a wide range of challenges to large-scale IoT development and deployment. Despite the numerous research efforts in current literature, there remains a massive lack of critical features that enable the broad adoption for large-scale applications. Our theory is to entwine IoT platform development with popular software and project development concepts, specifically, Continuous Integration (CI), Continuous Deployment (CD), Separation of Concerns (SoCo), and post-deployment operations. The core objective of our thesis is to accelerate and democratize IoT platform develop- ment. Towards this end, we propose Platform Independent Library of Things (PILoT), a platform-agnostic library of architectures and solutions that enable virtualized IoT platforms, peripherals, and an End-to-End (E2E) CI/CD capable IoT development architecture. Furthermore, we present our designs for two of the key enablers of PILoT and assess their viability and performance. HIVE enables virtualization of platforms and peripherals through an IoT containerization engine. While WhiteBus, enables True Plug-and-Play (TPnP) in IoT through a concept we introduced dubbed peripheral phantoms. Before concluding our thesis, we present our journey using PILoT to design and implement an IIoT solution from scratch in less than six calendar months.