Lightweight and Context-aware Modeling of Microservice-based Internet of Things

Abstract

Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides a scalable framework for heterogeneous, pervasive Internet of Things (IoT) devices. For such open and dynamic infrastructure, a proper service description schema is fundamental to unify the self-description of services. However, existing approaches mainly rely on verbose service protocols which produce unnecessary service overhead for resource limited devices. In addition, these approaches usually focus on describing service functions while largely ignoring context characteristics of IoT services. A lightweight and context-aware service description approach is yet to be proposed. In this paper, we propose a context-aware IoT service description approach based on the microservice architecture. Our approach not only provides a service description schema with lightweight protocols, but also comprehensively describes the context, service, and interface characteristics of IoT services. We demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of our approach for the case of a smart elderly care system. Furthermore, we provide a comparison with related approaches to elaborate on pros and cons of our proposal with respect to the state of the art in the field.