Dynamic fog computing platform for event-driven deployment and orchestration of distributed Internet of Things applications

Abstract

The next generation of Smart City and Industry 4.0 applications will be geographically distributed, heterogeneous, co-evolving software ecosystems, significantly more sophisticated than the current Enterprise or Cloud compute environments. To be economically sustainable and achieve solution longevity, these software ecosystems must be operationally simple, cost effective to maintain over extended periods of time, and able to cost effectively adapt to both changing environmental conditions and service requirements. This paper presents the BRAIN-IoT Federation, a distributed and highly modular federated environment that addresses these sustainability, longevity and adaptability challenges by leveraging OSGi - the Open Standard for Software Modularity. With a focus on Operational simplicity, BRAIN-IoT federation enables the dynamic deployment, orchestration and monitoring of distributed applications and uniquely, automatically installing new behaviours in response to environment triggers and User events. To show how, through the use of OSGi components and standards, it is possible to build a software solution able to address all the challenges presented by the modern scenarios, in terms of agility and adaptability, this work presents an use case study related to the use of robots for last-mile delivery of parcels. Over the next few years this field promises to provide high cost savings and reduction of the environmental impact, allowing to reduce the traffic caused by parcels delivering. An exploration of how the BRAIN-IoT federation is applicable to such environment, enabling robots adapt to changing and diverse Internet of Things environments, will be presented in the paper.