A NodeRED-based dashboard to deploy pipelines on top of IoT infrastructure

Abstract

With the widespread emergence of the Internet of Things (IoT), our environment and locations are turning progressively into smart environments ranging from individual houses/offices to schools, factories, and hospitals. Even more interesting, with the rise of Fog/Edge paradigms, the IoT application scope has been extended to provide critical services. By pushing resources such as compute and storage to the network edge, IoT-based services are taking benefits from their proximity to provide better performances. However, albeit an exciting development in and by itself, Edge/Fog computing platforms currently do not provide a convenient level of flexibility and efficiency to support the dynamic composition of services with a data-oriented approach. In this context, the Function-as-a-Service computing paradigm rises as a convenient/suitable paradigm to be adopted in the IoT landscape. For the sake of providing flexible IoT Edge/Fog deployments, this paper introduces a system providing FaaS services based on a distributed IoT infrastructure. Besides, we provide a dashboard based on Node-RED that exploits, in the backend, the FaaS system to make the users able to conceive customized applications using the resources (i.e., sensors and actuators) that the IoT devices can host.