Exploiting Container-Based Microservices forReliable Smart Mobility Applications

Abstract

Smart mobility is emerging, addressing heterogeneous scenarios with high impact on technology infrastructures, solutions, and people. Safety and availability are mandatory, forcing the design of new reliable services for localization, health monitoring of the user, maintenance of vehicle, and protection of the environment. This paper proposes a container-based microservice approach to the edge computing in IoT smart mobility scenarios. Since smart mobility backends must manage a large heterogeneity of applications, the proposed approach is promising with respect to the classical solutions (based on "monolithic hardware+software" devices), from the point of view of flexibility, upgradability, security, scalability, and reliability. A demo use case, based on industry-grade hardware and Docker, has been realized and multiple implementations of the same services have been executed in parallel, showing strong independence between them. Moreover, average delays of less than 10 ms are obtained, confirming the usability in several smart mobility (and smart city) applications.