Modeling and deploying iot-aware business process applications in sensor networks

Abstract

The concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) is an important part of the next generation of information. Wireless sensor networks are composed of independent distributed smart sensor nodes and gateways. These discrete sensors constantly gather external physical information, such as temperature, sound, and vibration. Owing to the diversity of sensor devices and the complexity of the sensor sensing environment, the direct modeling of an IoT-aware business process application is particularly difficult. In addition, how to effectively deploy those designed applications to discrete servers in the heterogeneous sensor networks is also a pressing problem. In this paper, we propose a resource-oriented modeling approach and a dynamic consistent hashing (DCH)-based deploying algorithm to solve the above problems. Initially, we extended the graphic and machine-readable model of Business Process Model Notation (BPMN) 2.0 specification, making it able to support the direct modeling of an IoT-aware business process application. Furthermore, we proposed the DCH-based deploying algorithm to solve the problem of dynamic load balancing and access efficiency in the distributed execution environment. Finally, we designed an actual extended BPMN plugin in Eclipse. The approach presented in this paper has been validated to be effective.