Enabling emergent mobile systems in the IoT: from middleware-layer communication interoperability to associated QoS analysis

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) applications consist of diverse Things including both resource-constrained/rich devices with a considerable portion being mobile. Such devices demand lightweight, loosely coupled interactions in terms of time, space, and synchronization. IoT middleware protocols support one or more interaction types (e.g., asynchronous messaging, streaming) ensuring Thing communication. Additionally, they introduce different Quality of Service (QoS) features for this communication with respect to available device and network resources. Things employing the same middleware protocol interact homogeneously, since they exploit the same functional and QoS features. However, the profusion of developed IoT middleware protocols introduces technology diversity which results in highly heterogeneous Things. Interconnecting heterogeneous Things requires mapping both their functional and QoS features. This calls for advanced interoperability solutions integrated with QoS modeling and evaluation techniques. The main contribution of this thesis is to introduce an approach and provide a supporting platform for the automated synthesis of interoperability software artifacts. Such artifacts enable the interconnection between mobile Things that employ heterogeneous middleware protocols. Our platform further supports evaluating the effectiveness of the interconnection in terms of end-to-end QoS. More specifically, we derive formal conditions for successful interactions, and we enable performance modeling and analysis as well as end-to-end system tuning, while considering several system parameters related to the mobile IoT.