On-Demand and Automatic Deployment of Microservice at the Edge Based on NGSI-LD

This paper focuses on a new approach to conceiving “virtual sensors” operating in smart environments, which are abstracted components able to map different behaviours on the same Internet of Things (IoT)-based infrastructures according to the needs of the high-level applications. To realize “virtual sensors”, it is necessary to codify user requests in an automation process for the deployment at the Edge of the microservices (MSs) that satisfy such requests. We present a solution that implements all the necessary functionalities to bind the user application with the Edge device in charge to execute the “virtual sensors”. In particular, the solution we propose is based on the FIWARE NGSI-LD information model, which helps us to standardize the communication among the different entities involved in the process. Moreover, the paper describes the reference architecture we designed, provides the implementation details of our first prototype and reports the results of our evaluation experiments.