Scripting Over-The-Air: Towards Containers on Low-end Devices in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) connects a variety of small devices, via gateways, to the cloud. Use-cases often require IoT devices to run logic that is not pre-determined before deployment, and that must be updated during the life-time of the device. In this paper, we explore the potential of over-the-air scripting and updatable runtime containers hosting application logic on heterogeneous low-end IoT devices. Based on RIOT and Javascript, we provide a proof-of-concept implementation of this approach for a building automation IoT scenario. A preliminary evaluation shows our prototype runs on common off-the-shelf low-end IoT hardware with as little as 32kB of memory.