Adaptive Middleware of Things

Abstract

Middleware for IoT (Internet of Things) helps application developers face challenges, such as device heterogeneity, service interoperability, security and scalability. While extensively adopted nowadays, IoT middleware systems are static because, after deployment, updates are only possible by stopping the thing. Therefore, adaptive capabilities can improve existing solutions by allowing their dynamic adaptation to changes in the environmental conditions, evolve provided functionalities, or fix bugs. This paper presents AMoT, an adaptive publish/subscribe middleware for IoT whose design and implementation adopt software architecture principles and evolutive adaptation mechanisms. The experimental evaluation of AMoT helps to measure the impact of the proposed adaptation mechanisms while also comparing the performance of AMoT with a widely adopted MQTT (Message Queuing Telemetry Transport) based middleware. In the end, adaptation has an acceptable performance cost and the advantage of tunning the middleware functionality at runtime.