Building IoT Systems Using Distributed First-Class Reactive Programming

Abstract

Contemporary IoT systems are challenging to develop, deploy, and maintain. This is because of their ever-increasing scale, dynamic network topologies, heterogeneity and resource constraints of the involved devices, and failures that may occur as a result of these characteristics. Existing approaches are either not at the right level of abstraction, require developers to learn specialized languages, or miss certain key features to address all these challenges in a uniform manner. In this paper we leverage reactive programming and code mobility to support the entire life-cycle of large-scale IoT systems. Our approach is based on existing programming technologies and offers simple and composable abstractions to developers. We implemented our approach in a middleware called Potato and used it to develop and deploy an IoT application on a Raspberry Pi cluster. We found that using Potato reduces much of the accidental complexity associated with developing and deploying IoT systems, resulting in clean and maintainable programs.