A Modular and Adaptive Architecture for Building Applications with Connected Devices

Abstract

Smart and connected devices offer enormous potential to enable context-aware, localized, and multi-device orchestrations that could substantially increase the reach and utility of computing. The growth of these applications has been hampered, however, as devices, their data, and their control have been largely sequestered to their own vendor-specific APIs, clouds, and applications-a largely stove-piped state of affairs. Where barriers between devices have been pierced, the connections often occur between vendor clouds, affecting the latency, privacy, and reliability of the original application, while simultaneously increasing complexity. Locally executing applications have not materialized as devices with incompatible communication protocols, inconsistent APIs, and incongruent data models rarely communicate. We claim that what is needed to unlock the application potential is an architecture tailored to facilitating applications composed of networked devices. Our proposed architecture addresses this by providing a port-based abstraction for devices using a small wrapper layer. This device abstraction provides a consistent view of devices, and embeddable runtimes provide existing applications straightforward access to devices. The architecture also supports device discovery, shared interfaces between devices, and an application specification interface that promotes creating device-agnostic applications capable of operating even when devices change. We demonstrate the efficacy of our architecture with two application case studies that highlight the abstraction layers between applications and devices and employ the embeddability of our system to add new functionality to existing systems.