The software fabric for the Internet of things

Abstract

One of the most important challenges that need to be solved before the "Internet of Things" becomes a reality is the lack of a scalable model to develop and deploy applications atop such a heterogeneous collection of ubiquitous devices. In practice, families of hardware devices or of software platforms have intrinsic characteristics that make it very cumbersome to write applications where arbitrary devices and platforms interact. In this paper we explore constructing the software fabric for the "Internet of Things" as an extension of the ideas already in use for modular software development. In particular, we suggest to generalize the OSGi model to turn the "Internet of Things" into a collection of loosely coupled software modules interacting through service interfaces. Since OSGi is Java-based, in the paper we describe how to use OSGi concepts in other contexts and how to turn non-Java capable devices and platforms into OSGi-like services. In doing this, the resulting software fabric looks and feels like well known development environments and hides the problems related to distribution and heterogeneity behind the better understood concept of modular software design. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.