Programming Model for Information Sharing among IoT Devices: Software Engineering Perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) has become an essential part of our daily lives and society as a whole, but it is still hard to develop and deliver IoT applications because of the complexity of the inherent heterogeneity nature of IoT devices. In this paper, we present a programming model for IoT, especially focusing on effective sharing of information based on software engineering ideas such as conceptual integrity and managing complexity. We analyze four programming models, Lisp, Fortran, Smalltalk, and Haskell, to understand what factors or ideas made them successful in managing complexity to solve problems in various domains. Then, based on the analysis, we propose an IoT programming model with the conceptual integrity that ‘every information is represented as a map.’ When we share information only in the form of a map data structure—a set of (key, value) pairs, we can simplify the process that manages the lifetime of the information shared. Even more, when we share information only in the form of a map, we can use both probabilistic data structures to reduce the footprint of the information when we need size efficiency and a JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) type information when we need to share high-quality information. We propose an architecture to accomplish this goal and implement a virtual machine to explain how information is generated, processed, and stored in the form of a map data structure.