IoT Helper: A Lightweight and Extensible Framework for Fast-Prototyping IoT Architectures

Abstract

Industry 4.0 is focused on the task of creating Smart Factories, which require the automation of traditional industrial processes and the fully connection and integration of different systems and devices. However, despite the wide availability of tools and technology, developing intelligent applications in the industry framework remains a complex and expensive task. This paper proposes a lightweight, extensible and scalable framework called IoT Helper to facilitate the adoption of IoT and IIoT solutions both in industry and domotics. The framework is designed to be highly flexible and declarative in nature, thus allowing for a wide range of configurations with minimal user efforts. To emphasize the practical applicability or our proposal, we present two real-life use cases where the framework was successfully adopted. We also investigate a crucial aspect of these applications, i.e., what level of scalability can be achieved with a lean generic framework based on inexpensive components such as ours. Comprehensive experimental results show the excellent cost-to-performance ratio of our solution. We consider this to be an important contribution because it paves the way for a more widespread adoption of IIoT-enabling technologies in industry.