A Microservice-Based Framework for Developing Internet of Things and People Applications

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) is characterized by billions of heterogeneous, distributed, and intelligent objects—both from the digital and the physical worlds—running applications and services. Objects are connected through heterogeneous platforms providing support for the collection and management of data that need to be understood. Since IoT systems are composed by a variety of objects and services, a key aspect for engineering them is their architecture. The new paradigm called Internet of people (IoP) is not unaware of this need. In IoP, humans play an important role so that design considering aspects as context becomes critical for making the most of these applications. This work presents a context-aware, serverless, microservice-based, and cloud-centric framework for the Internet of things and people (IoT-P) applications that extends the three-layer classic IoT reference architecture. It integrates most of the aspects considered by the architecture of IoT solutions emerging from different perspectives, being also domain independent. This work focuses on the application paradigm of IoT neglected by most proposals. This framework, combined with a previous work, offers a higher separation of concerns (SoC) degree than other proposals, by splitting the application layer into different sublayers or subsystems based on their responsibilities and tracing atomic components to serverless microservices, to facilitate the design, development, and deployment of IoT-P applications. An IoT-P application in the healthcare domain is presented to illustrate how this framework can be put into practice.